Icarus Relaunched
Icarus Relaunched

Summary/Abstract: One of the most enduring classical myths concerns Icarus and Daedalus. Artists have rung changes on the story of their escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth in literature, sculpture and painting, exploring the psychology of the father-son relationship and highlighting the opposition between youth and age. In the twentieth century, writing back to classical myth in order to critique the so-called wisdom embedded in these stories and, by extension, the culture that gave rise to them, has particular relevance for feminist writers in the United States and Canada (Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood in particular). Earlier in the century, W H Auden combined his critique of the Icarus myth with an ekphrastic poem that responds to Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” “Musée des Beaux Arts” reflects on Brueghel’s affluent bourgeois society as well as on humanity’s response to suffering. In the twenty-first century, visual artists still find inspiration in the Icarus figure. As Margaret Atwood suggests, those who deal with the types of enduring stories embodied in myths “must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past” (Atwood 2002: 178). I own a mobile called “The Aviator” that is a contemporary artist’s conception of a young man intoxicated with the experience of flight. My ekphrastic response to this three-dimensional work forced me to experiment with form by crafting a two-part poem that demarcates between past and present in order to reflect on present sexual and societal values and our understanding of gender. The form also sent me back to reconsider the original myth and its implications, exploring textually its ongoing imaginative potential.

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