Statues of the Poets

Generals and and statesmen must hold the plurality of the statues in Washington, the size and location of the statue not always being in proportion to the achievement, as with McLellan's statue at Connecticut Avenue and Columbia Road, or Buchanan's in Meridian Hill Park. Yet there are a few statues of other groups, clergy for example, and poets.

This summer I noticed on the George Washington University campus a statue of Pushkin, a gift, it turns out, of the city of Moscow:

This arrived about 10 years ago. I had long known the statue of Taras Schevchenko about half a mile away:

From what little I have heard of him, Schevchenko was not that good a poet. Yet his standing as a 19th-Century Ukrainian nationalist may have helped secure such a fine site in the early 1950; the monument speaks of the old Tsarist empire as the prison house of nationalities.

And of of course, in Meridian Hill Park, there is Dante:

There is said to be a statue of Pablo Neruda at the Organization of American States, but I think that this must refer to one of the many busts around the building.