Ekphrasis and Beyond: Transcending Temporal and Artistic Limits in Pictures from Brueghel (1962)

This paper shows that, just as Brueghel departed from Renaissance canons with his implementation of genre painting, William Carlos Williams’s poetry collection Pictures from Brueghel (1962) challenges the traditional boundaries of ekphrasis as the poet goes beyond mere description and delves into interpretation. Through his innovative approach, Williams not only borrows the compositional techniques and emotional essence of Brueghel’s paintings, but he also modernizes them. His poetry thus embodies the tension between the past and the new, reflecting a broader theme in twentieth-century American long poems. This study suggests that such an opposition between tradition and modernity can be read as a temporal in-betweenness. Indeed, Williams’s collection moves beyond a simple Bergsonian contamination of temporalities to embody a multidirectional aesthetic, reconciling past art forms with new poetic modes as they reinvent themselves in a metadiscursive relationship. As a result, Williams’s work constitutes a testament to the enduring power of transmission in art and its ability to transcend temporal and artistic boundaries. Williams invests the painter’s artworks with new meanings to support his conviction that the past must be re-evaluated or even destroyed to facilitate the creation of new art forms. Finally, Williams adopts a curatorial stance, appearing as an art critic and a historian, focusing less on artistic techniques and more on the ideological and transformative impact that Brueghel had on the uses and perceptions of art.