Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in the context of "Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting"

A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of their prestige and cultural value.

In literature, the epic was considered the highest form, for the reason expressed by Samuel Johnson in his Life of John Milton: "By the general consent of criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions." Below that came lyric poetry, and comic poetry, with a similar ranking for drama. The novel took a long time to establish a firm place in the hierarchy, doing so only as belief in any systematic hierarchy of forms expired in the 19th century.

"Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") is a 21-line poem written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood. It was first published under the title "Palais des beaux arts" (Palace of Fine Arts) in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann. It next appeared in the collected volume of verse Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), which was followed four months later by the English edition (London: Faber and Faber, 1940).

The museum, however named, is famous for its collection of Early Netherlandish paintings. When Auden visited the museum he would have seen a number of the paintings of the "Old Masters" referred to in the second line of the poem, including the Landscape with the Fall of Icarus which at the time was still regarded as an original by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem describes, through the use of Bruegel's paintings, humankind's indifference to the suffering of others.

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an ecphrastic poem by the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams that was written in response to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally attributed to Pieter Bruegel. Williams first published the poem as part of a sequence in The Hudson Review in 1960, subsequently using the sequence as the basis for his final book, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, published in 1962.

The poem, as indicated by the title, touches upon the story from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which Icarus, the son of Daedalus, took flight from Crete, where he and his father were trapped in exile, wearing wings made from wax and feathers. Icarus, disregarding one of his father's wishes that he not fly too close to the sun, did just that and melted his way to a feathery demise, drowning in the sea. The other warning from Daedalus was to not fly too close to the sea or the feathers of Icarus' wings would get wet and thus fail. This subject – and Bruegel's painting – are also treated by another Modernist poet, W. H. Auden, in "Musée des Beaux Arts", first published in 1939.