To escape, Daedalus created two pairs of wings by gluing feathers to a wooden frame with wax. According to the myth, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, also known as the inventor of the labyrinth, were imprisoned. The painting portrays, as the title suggests, the fall of the Greek mythological figure Icarus. The poem is inspired by a painting on a mythological theme he encountered at the gallery, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Its title refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, which Auden visited in 1938. One of the most well-known examples of an ekphrastic poem is “ Musée des Beaux Arts,” by the Anglo-American poet W. 1558, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles Pieter Bruegel the Elder, De val van Icarus ( Landscape with the Fall of Icarus), ca. Writers from Homer to more contemporary poets such as John Ashbery have employed the poetics of ekphrasis, their techniques reflecting the unique historical and social-cultural environments in which they wrote. This poetics of ekphrasis, that is, the reproduction of one art form through the medium of another art form, such as a painting or a photograph or a poem of a sculpture, or, perhaps more commonly, a poem about a painting, is prevalent throughout the history of art and literature. First, there is the real-life object itself, even if in the painting or sculpture this exists only as an imitation of an ideal version of the object then there is the painting or the sculpture, a new object in itself, which is at a second remove and finally, the poem is a third remove (and if we are reading a work in translation, that would be a fourth remove). They shed light on our understanding of the original artworks and even on the objects or stories being portrayed, although this occurs from several removes. Such poems also offer critical readings and discussions of the original works. These two art forms have particularly engaged writers’ imaginations, often leading or prompting them to respond to works of visual art in response poems, which then become new artworks in and of themselves. Of course, image-obsessed cultures existed even before the advent of photography, when the predominant manifestations of visual mimesis were paintings and sculptures. Indeed, for an image that is ultimately only bytes of information, one might wonder whether an original version can even be said to exist. In this sense, modern photography can be seen as a form of Aristotelian mimesis highly facilitated by technology, and the more often an image is reproduced, the more the “aura” of its original suffers. Perhaps most importantly, today’s digital images lack the physicality of photographs of the past. They also often seem very formal and stiff compared to the images of today, although it must be said that many of the pictures we take continue to fall into specific genres (the group shot, the goofy V-sign common in Asia, the mirrored-selfie). Buy the paper book / Buy the e-book.Old photographs and their conventions are both familiar and foreign to us, with their alienated and uncanny appeal. You’ve given me the gift of golden wings / The endless sphere of blue imaginings / The chance to rise above the silver clouds / The will to cast off untold ghostly shrouds / Don’t fly too high / Don’t rise too fast / Don’t tease the sky / Don’t taunt the past / You’ve given me the hope of warmer days / The blessed kiss of the sun’s fiery rays. The anthology traces love’s agony (“Broken Dreams”) and ecstasy (“Galaxies Cart-Wheeling”), from first blush (“Almost Strangers”) to full bloom (“Say ‘I Do!’”), as we fly to love. This creative collection, now in its 2nd edition, brings together love poems by Wayne Visser. Wayne Visser © 2017 Book Icarus: Favourite Love Poems The spell to enchant beauty’s hidden rhyme The wish to ride bare back on white moon beams You’ve given me the seed of unborn dreams The breeze to fan passion’s spark to a fire The will to cast off untold ghostly shrouds The chance to rise above the silver clouds
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