Landscape With the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams was an American poet well-known for his unique writing style and subject matter. A renowned imagist writer, Williams offers a curt description of Pieter Brueghel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Williams' interpretation of Breughel's painting is quite different from the lush, descriptive writing of W.H. Auden who also referred to Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" in his poem "Musee des Beaux Arts." In the poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," Williams relies on allusion to express his interpretation and perspective of Breughel's painting.
One of the most interesting things about Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," is the use of allusion, as it has to be applied at several levels. The primary level at which allusion is applied is from Breughel's perspective. In "The Fall of Icarus," Breughel depicts a peasant plowing his fields, which overlook an elaborate coastline and an expansive seascape. In the lower right corner of the painting, Breughel paints Icarus falling into the water, whose fall goes unrecognized by the peasants in the painting (Breughel). The reference to Icarus' fall is the first level of allusion that occurs in the Williams-Breughel dynamic. Breughel relies on the audience to have prior knowledge...
While Williams writes of the "tingling" of the new year, the "tingling" is not merely natural, not simply the world sprouting into rebirth. It is a very human, manufactured kind of celebration of the world's bounty. Thus to read the painting as a kind of a mockery of Icarus and the artist's desire for transcendence may not be entirely fair. Brueghel, after all could have just shown Icarus falling into
Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot. Specifically, it compares and contraststhe two works and how they are both excellent examples of the dangers of unexamined tradition. Unexamined tradition can be extremely dangerous in life, because it forces individuals to do things the "way they have always been done," rather than forcing them to find new ways to interact. This allows
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In literature, for example, we find this myth in the tragedy of Dr. Faustus, where the protagonist's fall is compared to the ambition of Icarus. In the visual arts this theme and myth is evident in famous paintings, such as, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (1558), by Peter Brueghel. Critics have noted that Breughel used many of the detail from Ovid's story in his painting -- thus proving
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