Some biographical notes:
He was born in 1883 in New Jersey to a Puerto Rican mother and a British father. He grew up speaking Spanish in his home, and his bilingual education helped garner a heightened sense of cultural understanding. He went to medical school and became a pediatrician/general physician. He married Florence Herman in 1912 and remained in New Jersey, while often traveling to New York City to meet with the booming artistic community developing there. He was a friend an admirer of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but he sought to counter their status as expatriates with his own status a devout American. As a doctor he was able to come into contact with many immigrant and poor/middle class families. These encounters are transmitted throughout his poems as he lends his focus to everyday encounters, common language, and the common experience of individuals living in modern America. Desiring to create truly “American” poems, Williams moved away from the European tradition, turning to the American landscape (of people and things) for his inspiration. His poems read like photographs, focusing on the immediate visual experience of the reader, often using objects to create the poetic scene. He was a fan of Marcel Duchamp, and I think that Duchamp’s work had a great influence on his poetry. Check this out if you want to see some of Duchamp’s pieces: http://www.understandingduchamp.com/
“The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923)
This is an example of what many have termed ” a still-life poem.” Like a painting, the poem presents a portrait, and image of one scene. As soon as the word “red” appears, the canvas gains color, and, toward the end, as the word “white” appears, another color finds its way onto the canvas in order to contrast with the “red.” Read this poem as if you are looking at a painting, and notice how the word “glazed” serves to create a sense of newness, a sense of “freshness” as if the painting has just been finished by the artist and is waiting to dry. The word glazed reinforces the image of “rain water,” and thus the word itself becomes an image. Each word in this poem serves as its own image, and as the words compile together, a linguistic collage develops…
Questions: This is an Imagist poem, how does it differ from Pound’s? What do the first two lines, ” so much depends/upon” mean? Why do you think nothing is capitalized? Also, why do you think the poet includes a period at the end, something which we don’t really expect? This poem is more about what the poet DOES, how he uses language, rather than about what the poem itself SAYS… why do you think that is?
“The Great Figure” (1921)
The poem begins “Among the rain/and lights” of the city. This is an urban setting, a direct contrast to the rural setting of “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The poem, once more, focuses in on two colors, gold and red, but it moves to focus in on sounds alongside the images. Sound becomes central to our reading. This poem expresses chaos, the frenzy of a the modern American city, a city which is constantly moving, speeding along the roads.
Questions: What do you think that the “figure 5/in gold” is trying to represent? How is this poem different from “The Red Wheelbarrow”? Is it a “still -life” or does it have more motion? All of his poems are very rhythmical, what does the rhythm do when you are reading the poem? What does rhythm enable?
Look at any of the poems we are reading by Williams. Choose any one and do a close reading. Ask yourself: what is this poem doing? How does the poet use language to convey images? How do the poems differ from one another? What settings do the poems take under their wing? How do these poems fit into the Modernist era…what modernist themes are being employed? Look at his use of the dash and other punctuation marks. For example, in “Spring and All,” no period ends the poem, why do you think that is?
This poem is imagist, although unlike Pound, it doesn’t seem as if Williams chooses his words quite as carefully. The words “so much depend upon” implies that there is a certain degree of potential located within the wheelbarrow itself. There are unlimited possibilities as to what could happen in relation to the wheelbarrow. Perhaps the reason why nothing is capitalized in the poem is because Williams does not want to give special weight to any of the words in the poem. Maybe he wants all the words to be equal in their importance, almost like Gertrude Stein. Williams includes a period at the end of the poem, maybe simply just to conclude his thoughts and to finalize the images. I also think it’s interesting how Williams uses three words in the first line of each stanza and one in the second line. The enjambment really makes the lone word in the second line pop out.
I chose to do a close reading of Danse Russe. I believe this poem is about a man coming to terms with his own humanity and existence as an individual. The poem begins with the speaker’s wife, baby, and Kathleen all being asleep. Therefore, the man has a family, yet at this moment in time he is alone. This ties in with the modernist theme of alienation. Although people tend to define their happiness and life by the existence of others, in that family and friends become a part of us, in reality we are individuals. The fact that the man is naked shows that he is trying to strip away all aspects of civilization and reconnect with his natural self. As he admires his body parts in their natural, naked form he realizes his individuality. This is his body, his shoulders, his buttocks, which are all his despite the existence of his family. His body is his unique possession. Therefore, as he comes to this realization, he must try to find happiness as an individual. He needs to learn to be the “happy genius of [his] household.” We are all born as individuals, void of attachments; therefore it is important to learn to be happy and content as an individual. The repetition of “lonely,” implies that this man is having trouble finding this peace with himself. Being alone and “lonely” are two different states, in which the man must find peace with being alone and not become lonely.
To me, “The Red Wheelbarrow” uses a lack of capitalization in the same way that Pound does. A sense of continuation is established by the fact that the first word is not capitalized. It is as if something has come before and this poem just finshed it. In this sense, this poem is similar to Pound’s Canto I because it also does not have an established beginning because it begins with the word, “And.” Also, the rest of the words are not capitalized which gives the feeling that all of the images are equally important in the poem. No image is meant to take over another. They are simply meant to exist together on equal ground. I think that the period at the end of the poem further establishes the idea that Williams is trying to put more emphasis on the images rather than an overreaching and underlying message. To me, this poem is about the beauty of the images and not a hidden, complex message. Fleeting thoughts and perpetual questions about the meaning of the poem are limited, if not stopped, by the period and helps us to refocus on the images that are created by the words of the poem.
Williams’ use of objects in “The Red Wheelbarrow” create the imagery of a fleeting moment captured in a photograph. Each line offers the reader an object, creating a “linguistic collage” of images. The poem is the literary equivalent to the static “still” of a photograph; the scene in this instance is a wheelbarrow after it has been “glazed” by rain. Each object contributes to Williams’ original idea.
I believe the first two lines “so much depends/upon” are informing the reader that the poem depends upon every single word. The poem, as well as the image it conjures, cannot be possible without each object. I think this could be considered a literary equivalent to Duchamp’s cartoon-like painting style. Duchamp attempts to “engage” the mind of his viewer by use of abstract figures in combination with a descriptive title (Nude Descending a Staircase). The creator of each work deconstructs an idea into individual elements and arranges them to express that idea. Duchamp chooses abstract, static images to imitate an idea of motion, which the reader identifies as a nude figure in the process of moving down the stairs. Williams uses individual objects and creates imagery of a specific point in time. Where Duchamp uses art to evoke thought, Williams uses words to evoke experience. The reader imagines the scene at hand, then posits associations of newness/freshness with the descriptive elements, of “glazed” and “rain.” This experience, from reading the poem, is similar to that of viewing a photograph – a certain memory may overcome the viewer, even though the photo is merely a static image.
These are all great observations and close readings. Thank you all.
Another note on the difference of “The Red Wheelbarrow” from Pound’s imagism: the way in which the poet illustrates the scene/object. For Pound, he provides a scene (the metro with the faces of people), and then separates this line with a semi-colon to introduce a completely unrelated image of the wet bough and nature. This image is then superimposed on the scenery he previously provided to give the scene a more detailed depiction that Pound intended for us to “see” in his poem. Contrarily, Williams begins his imagistic poem with the wheelbarrow, and then builds on the scene by adding in the chickens at the end. The reader does not impose one object onto the other, but sees them together side by side. They act interdependently to project the image onto the reader’s mind. Also, the lack of capitalization gives each word the same importance and does not divide the poem, leading the reader to “see” the two objects as equal parts in the scene.