Charles Baudelaire, a great poet of the modern era, turns like many others to the literature of the ancient world for an image which expresses his feelings about his artistic predicament. Hear his poem, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare”, read by Béatrice Damamme-Gilbert and follow in English here.
Although the myth of Icarus is now very familiar to us, it may have received less attention in the ancient world before Ovid celebrated it in his Metamorphoses. The earliest surviving literary references do not date from much before his time, and the difficulty of finding representations from earlier Greek vase painting may be another indication. You can hear Ovid’s treatment in the original and follow in English here.