page_title: Icarus
section_title: Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern literature
hierarchical_section_title: Icarus / Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern literature
context_page_description: In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus' father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings nor the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun; when the wax in his wings melted he tumbled out of the sky and fell into the sea where he drowned, sparking the idiom "don't fly too close to the sun".
  This tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaethon.
context_section_description: Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth and its connection with that of Phaethon influenced the mythological tradition in English literature as received and interpreted by major writers including Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce.
  In Renaissance iconography, the significance of Icarus depends on context: in the Orion Fountain at Messina, he is one of many figures associated with water; but he is also shown on the Bankruptcy Court of the Amsterdam Town Hall – where he symbolizes high-flying ambition.
  The 16th-century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally but perhaps erroneously attributed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was the inspiration for two of the 20th century's most notable ecphrastic English-language poems, "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams.  Other English-language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton, "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish, "Mrs Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert, and "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" in Hiromi Yoshida's Icarus Burning chapbook. The Norwegian Axel Jensen used Icarus as a metaphor for troubled modern young men, in the 1957 novel Icarus: A Young Man in Sahara.
caption: Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1558), famous for relegating the fall to a scarcely noticed event in the background
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