The Frick was a safe bet. If you can’t find anything to like in its array of masterpieces from Duccio to Degas, then Western art ain’t for you. Henry Clay Frick paid the prodigious sum of US$2.4 million for the site on Fifth Avenue at 70^th Street in 1907, erected a Palladian villa to house his collection as much as his family, and lived there from 1914 to his death in 1919. The collection went public after his widow’s death in 1931. When it’s not too crowded, whispers of Edith Wharton can be heard in the duskier corners.

Peter Steele has written two of his best ‘ekphrastic’ poems about works in the collection. An early one takes its cue from Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Moore: ‘I return to your image, / hardy thinker, gentle speaker, courtier / of life, a humanist to the death.’ The other poem chooses an odd-ball object in the collection. We start with it. A mysterious Frenchman, Jean Barbet, known to history as ‘Cannonier du Roy’, a maker of cannons and munitions, cast an elongated bronze angel in 1475. Peter’s poem, ‘An Angel from the Bombardier’, was originally planned as the title for his recent book of poems on works of art, now simply called Plenty (2003). The hellish lights of September 11 and the Bali bombing changed his mind. The work is as mysterious as the artist. We have no idea where this beautiful late Gothic figure came from: ‘Perhaps / you lodged for a while at the Sainte-Chapelle, that berg / of light held up by fiery lancets, / or played a weather vane, or topped a newel / in some arriviste chateau …’ It stands like a guardian in the courtyard. Nobody pays it much attention.

Inside, we start with the Living Hall where the pictures have remained in place since Frick’s death – and what pictures! A pair of Titian portraits flanks Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert, a miraculous revelation of light and air. Opposite this formidable trio is El Greco’s St Jerome, with the Holbein portraits of Moore and Thomas Cromwell as company. We all agree on the superiority of the Moore portrait over the dis-mal and dislikeable Cromwell, breaker of abbeys, destroyer of monasteries.

As we pass into the long West Gallery, which houses the sumptuous organ chords of the collection – Veronese, Van Dyck, Hals, Rembrandt, Velàzquez, Goya, Turner – I notice how much the poets respond to the subjects of the pictures. Chris immediately identifies with Frans Snyders (‘He could walk right into the room’) in Van Dyck’s glittering three-quarter length portrait. The poets read the pictures as disclosures; they are all objects in the present rather than documents of the past. It’s a bracing way to look at old masters.

Art history catches up with them in a back hallway where we find Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor facing Fra Lippo Lippi’s Annunciation. They were painted within a year of each other, circa 1440. Here northern ars nova confronts southern Renaissance. Lippi sets his figures in a grey minimalist space that Donald Judd would have been happy to own up to. Van Eyck’s figures parade before an extensive townscape, a river crossed by bridges, a prospect of landscape. The poets are much taken by the contrast.

Enough of old masters – this is New York! Next door, Knoedlers have a rough and ready exhibition of Milton Avery marine paintings. He is a master of direct painting and always reminds me of Fred Williams, both bringing the discipline and enterprise of modernism to landscape painting. We’re moving too slowly. Down to 57^th Street, where Pace has a brilliant survey of Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictographs from the 1940s. Divided into grids with heads and hands, runic circles and signs set into the armatures, they are among the finest works in the ‘archaic’ phase of abstract expressionism. They fulfil poetically the longing for the primitive and the archetypal. The Pictographs read like visual poems. The poets are more polite than enthusiastic.

Last stop before lunch is Jane Wilson at D.C. Moore, on Fifth Avenue. The artist is a recent discovery for me. She’s eighty and works and lives way out on Long Island in the Hamptons, painting these rapturous, large-scale sea- and skyscapes with just a smudge of land at the base. The palette is luminous and full-throated. She’s not afraid of night skies or the golden bars of sunset. The poets respond warmly. Chris buys a catalogue for his partner, the painter Kristin Headlam. I catch Peter looking more intently than usual.

Lunch is in the back bar at Connolly’s, behind the gleaming new MOMA. Much talk of current literary endeavours is consumed with pints of Harp and bottles of Californian red. Australian poets certainly don’t lack ambition: Chris will publish his long poem soon and is ruminating on another one. It’s the reception or lack of it that makes it hard going for poets. Peter has had only two substantive reviews of Plenty (including one in ABR) and disappointingly slight notices elsewhere.

After lunch, I try and bully our way into Christie’s preview of their contemporary sale. I’m only partially successful. We see a marvellous early Diebenkorn and a mighty Motherwell Elegy before the pleading eyes of the assistant get us to leave the installation.

Last stop of the day is the surprisingly thin Noguchi retrospective at the Whitney. Noguchi is a greater sculptor than Henry Moore, but that doesn’t come through here as loudly as it ought to. The poets like him a lot, especially the marble figures carved and constructed of bone, from the 1940s.

Darkness has fallen on the Upper East side as we make our way to a posh bar on Lexington and a bottle of D’Arenberg Grenache at Manhattan prices. Everybody is fading. The day stays vivid.