Daedalus and Icarus in Verbal and Visual Frames: A Comparative Reading of Bruegel, Auden and Ağıl

Abstract

ABSTRACT The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has been the subject of numerous literary texts as well as artworks in the Western tradition. The Turkish poet Nazmi Ağıl’s two ekphrastic poems ‘Bruegel: The Landscape as Icarus Falls’ and ‘Auden’s Icarus’ are retellings of the myth with reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. If ekphrasis is the representation of a work of art in literature, then Ağıl’s poems are re-representations of both verbal and visual frames by critiquing Auden’s interpretation from the mouth of a storyteller Kamil in the former poem and Daedalus in the latter. Ağıl’s aim in alluding to the Western sources is to highlight political issues in Turkey. This paper, then, argues how Ağıl’s poems complicate the reading process by playing with verbal and visual frames.