Ways of Seeing Williams’s “Pictures from Brueghel” CHARLOTTE L. KENT, MERCY COLLEGE ABSTRACT | In this article I focus on a handful of late poems from William Carlos Williams’s 1962 collection Pictures from Brueghel, to demonstrate how Williams’s attention to new beginnings may ignore his debt to what W. H. Auden in the “Musee des Beaux Arts” called the “old masters” such as Pieter Brueghel. I offer close reading techniques to draw interarts comparisons and address the meaning of grammatical elements in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” such as Williams’s use of syntax to “minimize Icarus.” My close reading of grammatical and syntactic features functions not so much to celebrate form for its own sake, but rather as a technical means to locate how Williams repositions Brueghel’s painting through grammatical equivalen- cies. I emphasize that Williams was a creative reader of Brueghel, with his imagina- tive renderings of the Flemish master’s paintings unconstrained by documenting the marks on a Brueghel canvas with uninflected veracity. This is true to the point that Williams takes great liberties with his literary impressions of Brueghel. Williams’s cre- ative readings and revisionary writings of Brueghel are thus as much examples of him looking outward as part of an inner dialogue. KEYWORDS | William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel, Pieter Brueghel, ekphrastic poetry William Carlos Williams wrote a series of poems that address ten paintings by the sixteenth-century artist Brueghel.1 The ten poems of “Pictures from Brueghel” were first published in the Spring 1960 issue of The Hudson Review, and then rearranged, with one of them altered, for his next and final book of poetry. Published just after he died in March 1963, Pictures from Brueghel and William Carlos Williams Review, Vol. 32, Nos. 1–2, 2015 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA