Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

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).