When the American poet Hart Crane declared that Charlie Chaplin made writing poetry pointless, and then proceeded to dedicate one of his less successful poems, 'Chaplinesque,' to that comic genius, he was encapsulating the tensions (often very creative ones) which have existed between poetry and film since the birth of the cinema more than a century ago.

Thousands of poems have been written on a cinematic theme (I refer you to the magnificent Faber Book of Movie Verse, edited by the Observer's film critic Philip French, for a wide-ranging selection). Probably the earliest film about a poet - in fact, it is one of the very first biopics - is D.W. Griffith's six-minute, single-reeler, Edgar Allen Poe, made in 1909. Since then, hundreds of films have been dedicated to the lives of poets, most recently Jane Campion's beautifully shot and sensitively acted study of John Keats' love for Fanny Brawne, Bright Star (2009), starring Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish, which is reviewed below by Ann Wroe.

Griffith's brief take on Edgar Allen Poe one hundred years ago - Poe was one of his favourite authors - was very much a product of its time, although it does offer some tantalising glimpses of the 'language of cinema' which he would subsequently help to create. He depicts Poe (played by Herbert  Yost) as a struggling writer not through the conventional title card so often inserted into the silent films of the time to explain the action, but by creating a small, dimly lit set, an interior made all the more claustrophobic by a sloping wall on the left of the frame. His dying wife, Virginia (played by Linda Arvidson, who was Griffith's wife), lies shivering on a flimsy bed.  

Despite the broad and unsubtle style of acting, this short film packs a powerful visual punch. It also features what must be two of the earliest examples of 'poetic licence' on screen:  in the film, a publisher rejects Poe's poem, 'The Raven.' In fact, this was one work by Poe which enjoyed instant success with public and critic alike, and Virginia Poe lived on for another two years after the publication of the poem. Griffith, like so many directors of the silent-film era, had no formal education (he left school early to help the family finances).  Kevin Brownlow, the world's leading expert on silent cinema, told me that this lack of formal education did no harm at all: indeed, Brownlow maintains, it frequently led to a fresher, more spontaneous approach to literary material than that taken by the more literate directors  of the time .

Some of the biopics dealing with the lives of famous poets have been laughably awful; many are worthy, if dull. But there have been creditable - and sometimes more than creditable - attempts to reflect the poets and the times in which they lived.

The great fifteenth-century French poet and adventurer, François Villon, may be the most 'filmed' poet in cinematic history, although the plots of the majority of these movies are laced with huge doses of fiction. In 1920, J. Gordon Edwards,  grandfather of Blake (Pink Panther) Edwards, directed If I were King, starring William Farnum as Villon, who is temporarily made ruler of France by King Louis XI (no, a poet never actually seized the political reins in France during the Middle Ages!). Seven years later, in 1927, John Barrymore was great fun as Villon in The Beloved Rogue.

In 1938, another version, reverting to the earlier title of If I Were King, was directed by Frank Lloyd, and scripted by the great Preston Sturges - not that there's much sign of the great 'Sturges touch' to come - with Ronald Colman giving a typically dignified performance as Villon.

After the talkies arrived, one of the first serious attempts to portray the life of a poet on screen was The Barretts of Wimpole Street, released in 1934. Elizabeth Barrett, the invalid poet, played by Norma Schearer, falls in love with Robert Browning (Frederic March), but the most intriguing performance comes from Charles Laughton as Elizabeth's father, Edward Moulton Barrett, a twisted, overbearing man with unhealthy yearnings for his own daughter. (Laughton was widely quoted as saying that the censors couldn't cut out the gleam in his eye). The film was re-made by the same director, Sidney Franklin, in 1957, with Jennifer Jones (who died on December 17 last year) as Elizabeth, Bill Travers as Robert, and John Gielgud (of all people) as Elizabeth's father.

In the 1930s, a cinematic style emerged in France which came to be known as 'poetic realism'. Its roots lay in realist literature, and combined working-class milieux and downbeat story lines, with moody art direction and lighting reflecting the atmosphere in pre-war France. Many of these poetic realist films are regarded as cinematic masterpieces today:  Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934), Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1937), Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937) and La Bête Humaine (1938), and Marcel Carné's Le Jour se Lève (1939)

Moving from the sublime to the frankly ridiculous, in 1949 David MacDonald directed The Bad Lord Byron, starring Dennis Price. The film begins on the poet's death bed. He is then whisked off to a purgatorial courtroom, where a faceless judge determines whether he is to be remembered by posterity as a poet and a liberator, or as a seducer and a libertine (do you have to choose?) The dialogue is excruciating: 'You're far too bright a flame to be extinguished by a woman's fan,'; 'Your British sense of fair play is implacable.'

I am sure most poets writing today would envy the speed of Byron's success in this movie (if not with women, then professionally): his first collection of poetry sells out the  morning it goes on sale. The Bad Lord Byron was a financial disaster for the British studio, Rank, and didn't exactly do much for the career of Price, who had been so wonderfully cast in the Ealing comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, earlier that same year (1949). The one saving grace is the ever-delightful Joan Greenwood's performance as Lady Caroline Lamb.

That good lady and Lord Byron re-appeared on the silver screen in 1972. Lady Caroline Lamb was directed and scripted by Robert Bolt. This was not the finest hour of this brilliant screenwriter (responsible, of course, for Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia and A Man for all Seasons). The film stars Richard Chamberlain as Byron, and Bolt's then-wife, Sarah Miles, as Lady Caroline, but it is nowhere near as interesting as Ken Russell's bizarre Gothic (1986) - an intriguing (or infuriating - depending on your feelings about Russell) account of the famous night when Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Percy Shelley (Julian Sands) and Mary Shelley (the late and very much lamented Natasha Richardson) spent a night at a country estate in Switzerland.

The great American poet, Walt Whitman, is depicted in John Kent Harrison's 1990 film, Beautiful Dreamers, which is based on real events. When the superintendent of a Canadian insane asylum, Dr Maurice Bucke (Colm Feore) - who later become Whitman's biographer - meets the poet (played by Rip Torn), his life, and that of his wife and the asylum's inmates, is radically changed. Although the production values are poor, the movie should at least be commended for its humane handling of the issue of mental illness. Moreover, Torn - probably best-known today as Garry Shandling's sidekick, Artie, on The Larry Sanders Show, but who has also appeared in such films as The Cincinnati Kid, Payday, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Cross Creek - gives a convincing performance as the non-conformist poet and journalist with a social conscience.

In the excitement over Bright Star, it is easily forgotten that Jane Campion filmed another powerful film about a poet nine years earlier. 

An Angel at My Table (1990), deals sensitively with the life of the troubled New Zealand poet Janet Frame, especially her triumph over life in a mental hospital, and her literary success against all the odds. Like all Campion's movies, this one is magnificently photographed, and Kerry Fox gives a beautiful performance as the adult Frame, who was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Some believe she may actually have had high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome.

One of the finest films about a poet to emerge over the past ten years is Il Postino (The Postman), directed by Michael Radford in 1994, and portraying the touching friendship on the Italian island of Capri between the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (beautifully played by one of my favourite actors, Philippe Noiret), and a humble but imaginative fisherman, Mario (in an equally marvellous performance by the extremely ill Massimo Troisi, who tragically died just after the shooting ended). As in so many of the other films I have already discussed, this movie takes liberties with the facts. Neruda was not exactly in exile on Capri. He was hiding from the authorities back in his native Chile because he had stood up in the Senate and courageously denounced the country's President. What is more, his month on Capri actually took place in 1952, not in 1971 (the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature - as occurs in the film). Neruda is also shown dancing and swimming - two activities he hugely disliked! 

But these are amongst the most successful instances of poetic licence that I can recall in any film: the movie is about human relations, not about strict loyalty to the facts, and as such it works gloriously. Moreover, there are many moments that do reflect reality: while I was in Chile researching my biography of Neruda, I was frequently told that the poet was very generous with the time he gave to younger aspiring writers (like Mario). At one point in the film, Mario repeats Neruda's own lines of verse back at him. I was told in Moscow that Neruda was delighted when a hotel shoe-shine boy approached him on one of his many visits to Russia, and began reciting one of his poems to him. (It was probably delight fused with amusement: Neruda himself found it very difficult to recite his own poems from memory!)

Il Postino is one of the great films about the process of writing a poem. Neruda and Mario share some wonderful scenes in which they discuss this process (although Mario primarily wants to use the great love poet's advice to woo the local Capri beauty, who is played by Maria Grazia Cucinotta). At one point, Mario startles Neruda by suggesting the possibility that 'the whole world is a metaphor for something else.'

Neruda's great Spanish poet friend, Federico García Lorca, has been portrayed in at least two major movies. Lorca, muerte de un poeta  (Lorca, Death of a Poet), was a six-part mini-series of 1987 which mixed docu-drama with documentary footage. Each episode opens with Lorca's execution by firing squad, and then flashes back to a different era of his life and Spain's political history. It traces his career, his friendship with such key cultural figures as Salvador Dalí, and his relationship with his family. In an unusual move, the Spanish TV network which produced the series cast the British actor Nickolas Grace as Lorca - best-known at the time in Spain for his role in the British mini-series, Brideshead Revisited.

In the Lorca film, Grace acted out his dialogue in English (while everyone around him acted in Spanish), and recited Lorca's verse in British-accented Spanish. All the dialogue was then dubbed into Spanish. It has to be said that the dubbed scenes work far better than the scenes in which Grace recites Lorca in Spanish.

In 1997, Esai Morales played a journalist who is looking into the disappearance of Lorca (Andy Garcia) during the Spanish Civil War in a movie predictably called The Disappearance of García Lorca. It won't, I hope, spoil your enjoyment of the film to remind you that Lorca was actually assassinated by fascist soldiers in August, 1936, just after the Civil War started. Andy Garcia's performance is appropriately passionate and, unlike Nickolas Grace, Garcia gives an impressive recitation of lines from Lorca's celebrated 'Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias' (usually known in English as 'At Five in the Afternoon'). It has to be said that Garcia was born Andrés Arturo García Menéndez in a Spanish-speaking country (Cuba), even though his family moved to Miami after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion when he was only five.

In Tom and Viv (1994), Miranda Richardson - a superb British actress who, when I interviewed her some years ago, denied that she tended to be typecast as mentally fragile characters - plays the mentally fragile Vivienne Haigh-Wood shown eloping with Tom Eliot, better known as T.S. Eliot (Willem Dafoe). Despite some memorable moments - particularly when Eliot's in-laws listen in utter bewilderment to a reading of The Waste Land - a major problem is that Defoe is badly miscast. Richardson, however, is brilliant.

A pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio was a surprising choice to play the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in Total Eclipse (1995). His performance is better than we might have expected (which may not be saying too much), while David Thewlis is well cast as Rimbaud's poet-lover, Paul Verlaine. Sensitively directed by Agnieszka Holland, and with a thoughtful screenplay by Christopher Hampton, the film nevertheless leaves us unfulfilled, with a sense of hollowness. This may be partly due to the fact that the poetry, when quoted at all, is in English, (we crave the original French), as well as to an inescapable feeling of superficiality. 

In contrast, John Madden's Shakespeare in Love (1998), benefiting from an equally intelligent screenplay by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, also enjoys performances of depth from both Joseph Fiennes as the bard and Gwyneth Paltrow as Viola de Lesseps, and even Ben Affleck is impressive as Ned Alleyn.

In 2000, the American film-maker Julian Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, an absorbing look at the life of the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, whose open homosexuality led to two years' imprisonment. Schnabel is also a painter, and the film is visually stunning. But it is the Spanish actor, Javier Bardem, in his Oscar-nominated performance as Arenas - reciting the poetry as we, the viewers, look out of the window of a moving vehicle at streets and people - which make this one of the true and genuinely potent examples of cinematic lyricism in recent years. I should point out, however, that the film was actually shot in Mérida and Veracruz in Mexico, and the footage of Cuba was taken from the archives.  

The relationship between two giants of English poetry - William Wordsworth (John Hannah) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Linus Roache) is explored in a little-known but well acted and photographed film, Pandaemonium (2000). When the two men's friendship dramatically deteriorates, the director, Julien Temple, and the screenwriter, Frank Cottrell Boyce, clearly side with Coleridge, who is depicted as the warmer-hearted of the two. The film eschews a 'chocolate box' representation of the period (on the cusp of the nineteenth century), and instead sets the movie against the political and technological upheaval of its time - which in turn reflects the volatility of the relations between the two poets. Particularly stirring from an audio-visual point of view is the scene where frost gradually fills a window while Coleridge's poem, 'Frost at Midnight,' - in which he is observing his young son - is recited.

Sometimes poetry finds its way into films even when the film is not about the life of a poet. Some of the works by the great British director Terence Davies explicitly quote from his favourite poems. (Davies has a wonderful ear for the sound of words, and he is also a gifted poet himself. Anyone fortunate enough to have been at a 'Poet in the City' evening devoted to poetry and the cinema at King's Place, London, last November will have been overwhelmed by Davies' recitation of Alfred Noyes' poem, 'The Highwayman.') Sometimes, the choice of poems in films can be truly surprising: Marlon Brando's recitation of lines from T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' in Apocalypse Now springs to mind.

Movies can, of course, be intensely 'poetic' without quoting lines of verse or making any overt reference to specific poets. Jean Cocteau's movies are a case in point. Cocteau himself mischievously liked to claim that they were not poetic, but full of heightened reality. During the making of La Belle et la Bête in 1946, he deliberately sought out a sordid setting to film the Beast's lair because, he said, he felt it would be more magical.

Film directors often employ poetic techniques to depict abstraction and non-linear narratives. Some poets - notably Nick Drake - are both poets and screenwriters. I recently re-watched Yuri Norstein's masterly 1979 animation short, Tales of Tales, and found it as poignant and lyrically potent as on my previous viewings - and I'm not a huge fan of animation as a whole. The 29-minute film deals with the fleeting nature of memory as touchingly as any poet might have done. In fact, you could argue that it is a visual poem in itself. Few entire poems could be viewed as 'films in verse' - even if some do use cinematic techniques.

John Patterson, writing recently in the Guardian, claimed that 'even movies about poets who themselves were not in any way boring tend to be boring - deeply, harrowingly boring.' As this article has argued, there are a number of honourable exceptions to Patterson's over-archingly gloomy vision.

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How Bright a Star?