For Scott, in the case of the Brueghels and that of other contemporaneous Flemish painters, ‘their presentation simultaneously of a multitude of diverse actions or events demands an energetic and comparatively free movement of the eye’. It must be noted at this juncture that David Scott, in his seminal study Pictorialist Poetics (1988), singles out the creative challenges that the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus presents for the poet an analysis of its influence on these writers therefore looks back to Scott’s extensive work in the field of textual and visual studies.
Exploring Butor’s treatment of the Icarus painting alongside two poems on the same work of art, then, not only brings out some of the common problems faced by writers attempting ekphrasis, but allows us to start rethinking the way we approach this concept. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that Les Mots dans la peinture has an ‘ekphrastic bent’, and that the work merits further attention beyond its use as a key essay in the study of word and image relations, not least because of the lyrical quality that it occasionally exhibits. It means that the ekphrastic leanings of a fluid piece of writing such as Butor’s intermittently lyrical essay, which examines the multifarious roles of words in painting, can be identified, despite the concept usually being understood as one rooted in poetry. Using such a concise definition of ekphrasis in fact broadens its parameters. Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis, that is, as a ‘verbal representation of visual representation’.
I favour the simplicity and straightforwardness of James W. Auden’s 1938 poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, William Carlos Williams’s poem, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, first published in 1960, and Michel Butor’s section on the painting in his 1969 essay Les Mots dans la peinture. This paper considers three ekphrastic texts that focus on the painting traditionally attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1555, oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm.
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