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Pictures
from Breughel:
II Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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by
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) |
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William
Carlos Williams was trained as a pediatrician, and devoted himself
to a lifetime of poetry writing and medical practice in his home town
of Rutherford, New Jersey. His earliest poetry was Imagist, but in
the 1930s he moved away from free verse. He rejected its looseness,
saying that "free verse wasn't verse at all" since "all art is orderly".
It is worth pointing out that both Eliot and Pound believed that free
verse, in their definition, derived from the French 'Vers Libre',
was indeed orderly, although the order was defined in less quantitative
terms than the traditional Fixed Forms. They rejected Whitman's approach,
which could be regarded as without any kind of order. Williams eventually
define a three-line 'triadic' stanza, which were divided according
to his 'new measure', which, in essence, considered a line to be a
foot. This is because he was trying to produce a characteristically
American voice, and he believed that the traditional rhythms were
inappropriate for the American idiom. Late in his life he wrote a
series of poems inspired by the paintings of Brueghel, for which he
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry two months after his death.
Although it isn't really Free Verse, our poem today is from that series. |
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According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
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