Copied with a difference: Ekphrasis in William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel

Abstract

It is no accident that most of the important critical literature on William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel appeared in the mid-1980s, the exact historical moment when critical theory finally converged with Williams' poetics. Following the lead of pioneering work by Joel Conarroe and John Dixon Hunt in the early 1970s, critics such as Mary Ann Caws, Marjorie Perloff, Henry M. Sayre, Wendy Steiner and Ulrich Weisstein were instrumental in developing a methodology for reading the intricate visual surfaces of Williams' poems. They saw the poems as verbal icons, theorizing a system of structural correspondences between poem and picture, and attending carefully to the syntactical complexity of the poems. In the heyday of structuralism and semiotics, critics focused almost exclusively on the poems as ahistorical linguistic structures, as highly patterned ‘visual texts.’