The Americanism On William Carlos Williams' Poetry

In this composition we will deal with some of Williams Carlos Williams´ poems focusing on Spring and All, The Red Wheelbarrow, This Is Just to Say, To Elsie, A Sort of a Song, Willow Poem and The Young Housewife. All of them are extracted from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams This paper will focus on the Americanism of Williams’ poetry, taking into account style, language and concreteness in his poems.

STYLE

Like many other poets of the early 20th century, Williams is self-consciously modern. He's defining what "modern" means, and he's defining it as a quality of experience that he calls "life," that has the characteristic of disrupting whatever was in existence before. And this is a feature that he wants to have in his poetry.

He's an imagist. Imagism is a visual metaphor, and Williams is above all a visual poet, a poet of the eye. This means that you have to see his poems to be able to read them. First you begin by hearing, then you have to start reading and seeing the poems before we can even think about how to really understand them properly. It is first of all a poem that meets you and challenges you through the eye, as a visual object in some sense on the page. The kind of seeing that Williams' poems call for is a way of reading that his poems themselves demand. In other words, there's a kind of link between how he sees the world and the way in which he asks us to read it.

The title The Red Wheelbarrow as the title This is Just to Say were added later to his work. This is important because, through presenting the poem without a title, Williams asks us to read and encounter these poems without a frame, without any pre-established boundary or explanatory introduction. That choice increases the immediacy of our experience as if Williams were asking the reader to get closer to the poem, face it, just as he is facing the thing he is writing about; or asking us to face not the thing that he's writing about, but his act of writing and seeing. The poem has a suggestion that requires as a poem the same kind of calm intensity of concentration that the poet's observation of the wheelbarrow exemplifies. So again, we think that the way of seeing the poem models the manner we read it.

The Red Wheelbarrow

This is Just to Say

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain 5

water

beside the white

chickens.

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox 

and which 5

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious 10

so sweet

and so cold

Williams' poetry does not follow any metrical scheme or rhyme or, some other in a sense, pre-existing principle or pattern. They are a free verse poems. Nonetheless, free verse does always have some kind of operative pattern, sometimes very strict and structuring ones, and these short poems are a good example.

Willow Poem

A Sort of a Song

It is a willow when summer is over,

a willow by the river

from which no leaf has fallen nor

bitten by the sun

turned orange or crimson. 5

The leaves cling and grow paler,

swing and grow paler

over the swirling waters of the river

as if loth to let go,

they are so cool, so drunk with 10

the swirl of the wind and of the river --

oblivious to winter,

the last to let go and fall

into the water and on the ground. 

Let the snake wait under

his weed

and the writing

be of words, slow and quick, sharp

to strike, quiet to wait, 5

sleepless.

-- through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas

but in things) Invent! 10

Saxifrage is my flower that splits

the rocks. 

Williams was influenced by Walt Whitman. Whitman was the first poet who introduced the free verse. He stated that free verse is the perfect medium for American poetry because it can be varied to register the inflections of individual speech or the nature of a particular vision or occasion. Williams uses free verse in his poetry, and we can say that free verses give Americanism to his poems. Moreover, through the free verses the spirit of democracy is incorporated in Williams’ poetry. Williams wrote completely in free verse and strove to push literature in a new direction. He wrote of seemingly commonplace things. He was even more radical in his Americanism than Whitman He disapproved of Pound’s and Eliot’s expatriation and called the publication of The Waste Land ‘the great catastrophe’. These new directions and free verses were formed to create new minds.

The poems’ shape organizes Williams' speech in a manner that disregards or disrupts normal familiar syntax. It does so specifically through enjambment, by carrying one line over to the next. Williams' enjambments have here the effect of breaking

...