1. After the Quiz
Find the Lost Generation article you got on Friday (it has a picture of Ernest Hemingway on it and a poem).
Read the article and identify features of Lost Gen lit; read the poem and answer the questions.
On a piece of paper, find an object and describe it without actually naming the object. Use complete sentences and as much detail as possible.

2. Warm Up
Using your unit 6 words, write about The Great Gatsby or the Modernism movement. Describe the people, what’s going on, or how they are feeling.

3. “The Red Wheelbarrow” William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
5 glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
What is theme of the poem? What literary significance does this poem hold?

4. Does it matter?
In a note quoted in a 1933 anthology, Williams said he had seen the wheelbarrow “outside the window of an old negro’s house on a backstreet” in Rutherford, where Williams also lived.
“The sight impressed me somehow as about the most important, the most integral that it had ever been my pleasure to gaze upon,” he said.
“I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much,” he wrote. “I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.”
Does it matter now that the poem is imbued with a story?

5. Imagism
Goal: Present objects as they actually are- no additional words necessary (not verbose!)
Wants poem to be exact representation, not an approximation
Use common language
Rejects the abstract, overly complex style of the Romantics (hello free verse!)
Tenets (according to Ezra Pound)
“I. Direct treatment of the “thing," whether subjective or objective.    II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.    III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. ”
Info from:

6. Imagism: William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox
and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Formal or casual?
Would you be able to find a theme?
Do you think William Carlos Williams is intentionally trying to leave this open to interpretation?
Leaving it so open allows the reader to actively participate in the experience by determining the meaning.
This approach allows the reader a glimpse into the speaker’s intimate relationship.
It also might change one’s perception of food.

7. Background on William Carlos Williams
Father was British citizen, mother was Puerto Rican and European
Exposed to literature as he was growing up, but didn’t feel pulled to it until he was in college and needed a creative outlet (inspired by British poet John Keats, tradition and form; Dickinson- does her own thing; and Whitman- freedom and determination of self)
Sometimes, Williams was at odds with the idealism and moral perfection of his childhood.
Became a doctor and practiced in Rutherford, NJ for his entire medical career (retired in 1952)
Many of contemporaries moved to Europe

8. Continued
Felt that his true home was America (remember diverse ancestry) and looked to it as an inspiration for his writing
Wanted it to reflect the American experience
Goal of creating relationship with reader, hence, his poetry is meant to force the reader to determine the significance for him or herself.
Friends Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) helped WCW find his place in the Imagist movement, but they became critical of his style after The Waste Land was published.
WCW frustrated that The Waste Land, epic poem by T.S. Eliot, was forcing a return to more traditional styles in American poetry.
Also took issue with the bleak, pessimistic, and inscrutable nature of the work

9. Last bit about
The Waste Land saw a world being destroyed by industrialization and war with no hope, a point WCW objected to.
He viewed the same landscape Eliot saw and imagined that a new, better world would spring from the turmoil.
Remember he is inspired by Whitman...wants to “affirm the self-reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world” noted critic Donald A. Stauffer.
He was also sorta jelly that Eliot’s poem garnered so much success while his works had been largely ignored.
This would change later in his life, but he didn’t know that then.
In response to The Waste Land, WCW wrote Spring and All which some consider to be his best work.

10. “Spring and All” (page 956)
Describe the imagery of the first two stanzas.
Natural and manmade images collide in the first three stanzas. Which is dominant?
Spring appears in stanza 4. It happens. How is it described?
What effect does spring have on the world?
Williams says that “objects are defined,” and his language becomes clearer and more positive. Compare this (again) with the first two stanzas. What sense of un-definition is there in those first two stanzas? What diction choice represent this lack of definition?
How, finally, does Williams feel about spring? How does the title of the poem fit into this feeling?

11. Homework
pring.htm
Read the analyses from Breslin, Schmidt or Markos.
Respond to one of these analyses agreeing or disagreeing with what the critic said of the poem.