William Carlos Williams  Born Rutherford, New Jersey U.S.A 1883 –  Poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright, translator, historian and Physician.  Born to an English father and Puerto Rican mother.  At 14 Williams studies for 2 years in both Geneva and Paris. Returning to the Horace Mann School in New York.

Williams and Pound Williams and Pound enjoyed a strong yet stormy lifelong relationship both as friends and rivals. Williams remained separate from distinct literary movements. The Imagist movement, largely led by Pound, can be seen to have greatly affected Williams’ writing and poetical sentiment. Williams’ work would also be a great influence on later poetical movements especially the Objectivists and the Beat Generation. EZRA POUND

Williams’ early years  In 1902 at the age of 19 Williams enters the medical school of Pennsylvania University and meets Ezra Pound and H.D.  Williams first published “Poems”  Married Florence Herman 1912 and set up medical practice in Rutherford where he would stay until his death.  In 1913 he published “The Tempers” his first book of serious poetry.  For Williams, although dedicated, being a doctor was a way of financing his goal of becoming a poet.

Williams’ early years  Although he remained in Rutherford most of his life, Williams spent much time in New York City with:  Williams also made a trip to Europe to spend time with Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Wallace Stevens Marianne Moore Marcel Duchamp Francis Picabia

Imagism  Radical poetical theory and aesthetic adopted by both British and American modernists.  T.E. Hulme wrote that the language of poetry was  “...a visual concrete one...Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language.”  Pound picked up upon Hulme’s sentiments and in 1912 wrote of “the forgotten school of images” thus, starting the movement and becoming its leader. T.E. Hulme -“Romanticism and Classicism”

Pound and Imagism  Pound coined the term “Imagiste” in an appendix to Ripostes (1912).  The movement was influenced by Japanese poetry amongst others and was primarily a reaction against the form and diction of Georgian verse.  Imagism demanded absolute precision in the presentation of an image and a move towards a controlled ‘free verse’  The conventions of Imagist poems were generally short, pointed observations, between four and five lines

Free Verse  Free verse was an important element of the Imagists and Williams’ later style. “...poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very short) line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme and meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetition, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday discourse.” -The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms pg 177.

Manifestoes of Imagism (Rainey 94,95) “An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” -Pounds essay, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (1912) 1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. -Imagisme (1912) F.S. Flint (reportedly quoting Pound)

In a Station of the Metro (1914) The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

Williams and Modernism “Most current verse is dead from the point of view of art” “Life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before...always new, irregular.” “For verse to be alive it must have infused into it something of the same order [life]...I am speaking of modern verse” -letter from Williams to Harriet Monroe Harriet Monroe

Williams and Modernism  Williams was self-consciously modern.  Williams felt that modernism was the quality of life which disrupted whatever was in existence before.  This “life” is a quality and energy that Williams wanted in his poetry.  Williams’ work exhibits this modernist change in sensibility.  Williams also developed new and unique assumptions upon poetry and human existence. This was a new the beginning of a new tradition evident in his poetry.

Kora in Hell (1920)  Williams’ “Poems” (1909) “The Tempers” (1913) “To Him Who Wants It!” (1917)  Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) - Prose-poem improvisations polemic.  Williams argues against the likes of Eliot and Pound as expatriates dividing modern American literature into two camps: those who stayed at home and those who left.  Kora in Hell also signals Williams profound affinity with America that is evident in his poetry and his doctrine of “locality”

Locality  “Williams saw one’s immediate environment, one’s “locality,” as the only source of that universal experience which, he thought, “great” art expresses. Such universal experience was communicable only on the basis of an authentic perception of the objects of the material world, which, he reasoned, could only stem from an accurate representation of the things we know, the things which we are intimately familiar: the “sensual accidents” bred out of “the local conditions which confront us”. -Dijkstra, Bram, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the early poetry of William Carlos Williams.

Spring and All (1923) A serial poem of 27 untitled but numbered poems. Interspersed with a prose doctrine that represents the theory behind the poems. Spring and All remains Williams’ most well known work. Spring and All contains two of Williams’ most well known works, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ and ‘Spring and All’.

The Red Wheelbarrow  The second shortest modern poem behind “In a station of the Metro”  Williams’ most well known poem.  Undeniable link with Imagism aesthetic.  Imagism is a visual metaphor and Williams is a visual poet – a poet of the eye.

The Red Wheelbarrow (Rainey 529)  The poem exalts the “moment” with a vision of “life”  The poem is a visual object that meets the eye.  the language on the page requires the reader to ‘see’ the poem before hearing or thinking about it.  The poem is in free verse yet it is written in a highly constructed form. So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) line  1.  2.  3.  4.  5.  6.  7.  8. text so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens stresses syllables BOLD = MEDIUM STRESS BOLD & UNDERLINED = STRONG STRESS

The Red Wheelbarrow  Williams denies rhyme and meter yet creates a highly structured and strict free verse style. (possibly more strict than the styles he was trying to eschew)  This everyday cadence is supposed to echoe the sentiment of the ordinariness of the poems subject.  The poem attempts to display an ad hoc or unplanned verse structure that reflects the occasion and purpose of the poem.  The poem also deliberately disrupts normal reading by Williams’ ‘enjambment’ by carrying one line over to the next. This forces the reader to slow down and think about the poem.

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

The Red Wheelbarrow  Williams breaks the words up into their component parts: red – wheel – barrow / rain – water as if the objects consisted of these elements – redness, a barrow and a wheel yet he subverts this in the next stanza, “the white chickens” which are not made up of the whiteness and chickeness. Then the poem finishes.  Therefore the poem creates a way of seeing by disrupting syntax and then immediately destroys it.  Therefore, a mode of perception is established and then broken, this can be seen as a manifestation of Williams’ own modernist poetical beliefs –  “Life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before...always new, irregular.”

The Red Wheelbarrow  So what is it that depends on the red wheelbarrow? Williams just says “So much”  The word “glazed” is used as part of an imagist aesthetic and implies a light behind the poet and the reader, the sun that shines after rain?  This allows the reader to see the world in it’s component parts – the world in its inanity, it’s simplicity. For Williams this is the “So much” - the whole world.  “...all writing, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonised approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for “the beautiful illusion.” Very well. I am not in search of the “beautiful illusion”.  -Spring and All (Rainey pg. 501.)

Williams’ poetry & influence.  Williams was the poet of the everyday and he had a passion for the details of existence presented without moralising and with an Imagist’s brevity.  This style of Williams’ attracted many younger poets including those who became the Objectivists and the Beat Generation.  The Objectivists were founded inadvertently by Louis Zukofsky in 1931 and brought together under the principles of:  The poem as a formal aesthetic object.  That the poem should give a detailed account of things as they actually exist.

Williams and modernist painting  Williams had spent time in New York with avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.  Williams was influenced by both Dadaist and Surrealist principles in his work.  Williams also found an affinity with the work of post impressionist painter Paul Cezanne.  “I was tremendously involved in an appreciation of Cezanne. He was a designer. He put it down on canvas so that there would be a meaning without saying anything at all.”  -Dijkstra, Bram, Cubism, Stieglitz, and the early poetry of William Carlos Williams.

William Carlos Williams “No ideas but in things”