Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus

While both poems do mimic the painting, the poets’ gazes are most definitely coloured by their own experiences or stylistic agendas, which causes them to move beyond the painting and incorporate their own interpretations, styles and judgements. Williams’ for example chooses to completely eliminate the ship from the painting and concentrate only on the ploughman, amalgamating the rest of the images present in the canvas to “the whole pageantry.” This works well for his sparse, streamlined imagist style. But the larger interpretations in this case are in Auden’s poem. It is important to consider that “Musée des Beaux Arts” was written in 1939, after Auden's visit to China, where he had witnessed the effects of the Second Sino-Japanese war. Additionally, …show more content…
This is perhaps because Auden’s poem coaxes more of a response than Williams’. Of Williams’ collection of poems on Brueghel’s works, Hollander says, “As poetic interpretations, they seem particularly vapid, and do less for either a viewer or reader than the prose of a good art-historical writer could. Perhaps because Williams was, at this point in his work, imaginatively tired with his old project of denying that there were valid allegorical or mythopoetic agendas for poetry, these poems are characteristically flat, rather than strong, in their interpretive reticence” (Hollander, 252). While I would argue that Williams’ poem should not be dismissed and bears consideration as a good example of an imagist poem, it is definitely more descriptive rather than narrative or interpretive. This descriptive, detached style, which imitates statement rather than judgement, is perhaps why his poem does not elicit as much of a response as Auden’s. In this case, it is definitely, the narrative impulse of ekphrastic poetry mentioned by Heffernan that elicits a response. As Heffernan observes, graphic art “checks” this impulse, and in this sense Williams’ incorporates the checking of this impulse within the poetic medium too, sticking more or less to describing only what is present in the canvas. Auden, however, gives way to his narrative perspective of the scene – he suggests that the ploughman “may have heard the splash”; that the ship “must have seen something amazing,” while Williams’ simply observes these characters as they are on the canvas without giving them a narrative of their own. Based on this difference, it could be argued that ekphrastic poems that gaze beyond what is depicted on the canvas are more successful in terms of initiating responses than those poems that are more focused on only what is depicted in the