Question

How does Walter de la Mare use visual imagery in the poem ‘Brueghel’s Winter’?​

Answer 1

Answer:

The main aim of this paper is to conduct a stylistic analysis of five ekphrastic

poems: Walter de la Mare's “Brueghel's Winter,” John Berryman's “Winter

Landscape,” William Carlos Williams's “The Hunters in the Snow,” Anne

Stevenson's “Brueghel's Snow” and Joseph Langland's “Hunters in the Snow:

Brueghel,” all inspired by Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 painting by Flemish artist

Pieter Brueghel. The paper argues that these attempts to transform Brueghel's

painting into words are not mere verbal accounts of their source of inspiration

but rather poetic transformations of it in terms of meaning and style. Some of the

main questions that this study attempts to answer are: How do the

aforementioned poets employ the ekphrasis technique? What features of the

painting does each poet foreground, background or even change? What is the

poet’s most central preoccupation? To give answers for these questions, a

stylistic analysis of the poems will be conducted consecutively to highlight the

similarities and differences between them and Brueghel's painting in terms of

meaning and style.