Ways of Seeing Williams’s “Pictures from Brueghel”

Abstract

William Carlos Williams wrote a series of that address ten paintings by sixteenth-century artist Brueghel.1 The ten of from were first published in Spring 1960 issue of The Hudson Review, and then rearranged, with one of them altered, his next and final book of poetry. Published just after he died in March 1963, Pictures from Brueghel and other won Pulitzer Prize Poetry later that year. The book, which includes his 1955 collection The Desert Music and 1957 collection Journey to Love, opens with ten-part poem that constitutes titular work. The are neither models nor parallels but rather occasions Williams's creative activity, and as such they propel poet towards a consideration of role of artist and audience in generation and perception of (Behrendt 30; his emphasis). I offer here possible activities of this audience, who is both reader and viewer, suggesting how ekphrastic texts can be occasions for reader/viewer's creative study and self-reflection.Assorted literary studies reveal how much these lead their readers to art, but also how much thoughtful activity they generate as readers become viewers, navigating space of both. Regarding Hunters in Snow, Wendy Steiner wrote that it was certainly most searching critical account of that I have encountered (76). As work of art is a catalyst Williams, so his become catalysts a dynamic engagement with paintings. The first studies written on Williams's relation to art by Bram Dijkstra and William Marling focused on influence of various painters in his life. The writing of Joel Conarroe and John Dixon Hunt pioneered work relating and paintings in 1970s. The 1980s saw a number of critics-including Mary Ann Caws, Marjorie Perloff, Henry M. Sayre, and Wendy Steiner-examining as verbal icons, theorizing a system of structural correspondences between poem and picture, and attending carefully to syntactical complexity of poems (G. F. Scott 63). The new historicism of 1990s led to work by Stephen Behrendt, James A.W. Heffernan, and Grant F. Scott, who studied how shape what is seen by shifting focus away from visual text and onto process of perceiving and recreating pictures (64).In these scholars, but surely occasional common reader as well, a curiosity about is sparked. What do they look like? Is Williams right to say that the is organized / about a young // reaper enjoying his / noonday rest and how else to decide if the inn-sign / hanging from a / broken hinge is a stag a crucifix, except to look (CP2 389)? And once having looked, how do readers take him seriously that The Parable of Blind is without a red / in composition when there are clearly several reds in (391)? Who is Brueghel the painter who is unused to / manual labor and has no time any- / thing but his painting (385)?These questions, and many others, occur in space between and painting, when reader/viewer holds each in hand and, balanced between two, tries to make sense of their relationship. The uncertainty of whether what has been read is an accurate rendition of picture inspires curiosity that takes reader from page to picture to become a viewer. The uncertainty of what to think in comparing two is stressful but is what propels further study, as Caws admirably explains in her book The Art of Interference .2 The then may be a way of encouraging reader to become a viewer too, and from inevitable confusion when those two things meet to become a more curious person.IThe first poem in series from is titled Self-Portrait, which immediately raises question whether poem is about Williams or Brueghel's self-portrait painting. …