Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context: William Carlos Williams, the Imagist Movement, and Ekphrasis

William Carlos Williams was one of the leading players in the Imagist movement, a significant development within the “Modernist” literary landscape of the first half of the 20th century. Williams’s Imagist poetry, like that of his contemporaries Ezra Pound and H.D., emphasized concise language, vivid imagery, and a focus on concrete objects and experiences. This Imagist emphasis is typically supported by stylistic devices such as free verse, short lines, and minimal punctuation. These characteristics can all be found in Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” which is one of the poet’s later works, and thus representative of the style for which he was known.

In his final book, Pictures from Brueghel, Williams used his distinctive Imagist style to produce ekphrastic poems, that is, poems that describe visual artworks. In these poems, including “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” Williams uses vivid language to recreate the paintings while infusing the scenes with his interpretation of the relationship between art, myth, and daily life. This approach represented an innovative take on the poetic tradition of ekphrasis, which began in Western literature in ancient Greece (examples include Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad or Theocritus’s Idyll 1). The tradition has remained important, especially in poetry, millennia later. Some famous examples of ekphrastic poems from the last few centuries include “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” by Percy Bysshe Shelley and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (who was a major influence on Williams).

Historical Context: Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

The painting described in Williams’s ekphrastic poem is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus attributed to Pieter Brueghel (more commonly spelled Bruegel) the Elder, a Dutch Renaissance painter of the 16th century. Today, most scholars of the period doubt that the painting was really by Brueghel and argue instead that it was an early copy of a work by the famous painter that is now lost. In Williams’s day, though, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus was generally regarded as a genuine work of Brueghel’s. The painting was created in the 1550s or 1560s and depicts the myth of Icarus in an unusual way. Whereas the myth of Icarus has usually been seen (since antiquity) as a tragic meditation on the disastrous consequences of human ambition, Brueghel’s painting reflects instead on the insignificance of human experiences in the grand scheme of things. The fall of Icarus, replete with the monumentality of classical myth, is drowned out, so to speak, by the landscape. The foreground of the painting is instead dominated by a farmer plowing a field near the coastline as ships unfurl their sails; Icarus is only barely visible in the distance, near the bottom corner of the painting, as he drowns in the sea.

Williams was not the only poet inspired to ekphrasis by Brueghel’s innovative representation of the Icarus myth. W. H. Auden also produced a poem based on the painting in his “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1939), published more than 20 years before Williams’s poem. A later poem on the same painting is Michael Hamburger’s “Lines on Bruegel’s Icarus.”