Chosen by Andrew Motion - "Tate Members have contributed to the purchase of so many masterpieces over the last fifty years, so it’s extremely difficult to choose a single favourite work. Having said that, I have a particular affection for de Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet (how could I not?). The distant train speeding out of frame under its smoke cloud, the hauntingly empty arcade, the abrupt zigzag shadows, the truncated but warmly-twisted torso, the exuberantly suggestive bunch of bananas (bananas!): they all cohere (or rather, don’t precisely cohere) into an image which feels at once deeply mysterious and eerily familiar. How do we make sense of experience? How do we reconcile disparate objects? How might a writer – a poet – be uncertain in ways that a painter might or might not share? Here, as elsewhere in de Chirico’s work, it’s the questions that matter, more than the answers."

Andrew Motion is Poet Laureate.