English poet Christopher Logue (1926-2011) was one of the pioneers of the poster-poem genre. The image on this poster is a photograph of a dead, Rube Burrow, in his coffin. Burrows was one of the most infamous and hunted men in the Old West since Jesse James. He, and his gang, from 1886 to 1890 robbed express trains in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, the Indian Territory and Texas while pursued by hundreds of lawmen throughout the southern half of the United States. Burrows was finally killed in Linden, Alabama in 1890. He was one of the last gunmen to be killed and the image is being used to allude to the narrative of the poem, that of a lone man, guilty of immoral actions, but resolute in death. Logue is forgiving of this alternative vagabond mentality: 'Be not too hard when he gladly dies / Defending things he does not own'. The poem has since become an icon of 1960s pop culture and counterculture: it was set to music by Donavan and heard in Ken Loach's film adaptation of Nell Dunn's famous novel Poor Cow, and was later made popular by Joan Baez on her 1967 album ‘Joan’. Ref: Art and Artists vol. 3 no. 2 May 1968
'Poster Poetry' by Edward Lucie-Smith illustrated p. 29. The poster-poem was originally sold in Gear Boutique, Carnaby Street, London.

‘“I have never been part of the London literary scene,” Christopher Logue said in his 1993 Art of Poetry interview:
My time has been passed with painters, antique dealers, musicians, booksellers, journalists, actors, and film people. I find it natural to collaborate with others on such things as posters, songs, films, shows. This is unusual in literary London.
This collaborative spirit led him to reproduce his poems on all kinds of unlikely surfaces: mugs, beermats, T-shirts, mirrors, Tube station walls, Lake District concrete, and the silk lining of at least one gown. But Logue, who died in 2011, found his biggest success with his poster poems, a form he’s said to have invented.
The first, an antinuclear poem called “To My Fellow Artists,” he made with the designer Germano Facetti in 1958; the pair hung their prints in cafés and bookstore windows around the city, leaving a stack of them in the lobby of the Royal Court Theatre. Their reasoning was simple: big words on posters tend to be more widely read than small words on bound pages. To put a poem on a poster is to guarantee it a certain almost involuntary readership—especially valuable if, like Logue’s, your poems aim to provoke, amuse, or annoy. “Posters call you,” Logue writes in Manifesto. “So do poems … A poem unable to live on a poster / Is no poem.”
By the mid-sixties, Logue had amassed a small series of poster poems, most with print runs of fewer than a hundred copies. But one of them, 1966’s “I Shall Vote Labour” (“I shall vote Labour because if I do not vote Labour / my balls will fall off”) sold thirty thousand copies; it was for sale in Tom Salter’s Carnaby Street boutique, Gear, an iconic sixties counterculture shop.’ This article originally published in the Paris Review.