This special issue of Poetry East pays homage to poetry’s masters and teachers in hopes that we, too, will carry the art forward. In these pages, today’s finest poets introduce to readers their favorite poets and favorite poems from the past. Great Poems honors those poems we are passionate about and return to for myriad purposes—dazzling craft, perceptive knowingness, the fires of the imagination, and wisdom. I thank all the poets included here for their generosity. May this volume of great poems affirm poetry’s timelessness and express our collective gratitude for what we love and have taken to heart.This issue of Poetry East celebrates great poems with great art—paintings and etchings by Rembrandt. The consummate artist, Rembrandt’s paintings perfectly balance clarity and mystery, light and shadow. Rembrandt knew joy and sorrow, success and defeat, and his vision cuts to the marrow of what it is to be human.