Ut Pictura Poesis: Poetry of Ekphrasis in William Carlos William ‘s Pictures from Brueghel

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Abstract:

The paper examines Pictures from Brueghel, the last sequence of poems by the American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963); it is meant to shed light on the own value of this poetry, posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize. “The most American of all poets” was caught by indigenous rhythms of speech of the American English language; he was also impressed by the visual appearance of things that embodied the ideas; i.e. he was fascinated by the musicàl and the visual aspects of poetry. His mature poems have reached the furthest in engaging the visual. Ekphrasis, understood as a literary representation of the visual arts, is actually a very complex semiotic game where the discourse is also a metadiscourse: the choice of artists, the selection of his paintings, the order in which they appear in the sequence, the poems themselves as a poetic representation of the painter`s representation of the world, similarities between the artistic poetics of the painter and his admirerviewer- poet, all of these are examined in the paper, particularly the complex procedures that Williams used to repeate the visual quality in the new medium, i.e. to copy with a difference Bruegel’s pictures.

Keywords:

Bruegel, ekphrasis, Pulitzer, modernism, postmodernism.

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