As you read Williams' poetry, think about the following questions and post your responses below:
1) How does Williams play with interrelations among "the sister arts" (painting, photography, music)?
2) How do his poems use simple words that become meaningful when placed in juxtaposition or when placed in a highly visual composition?
3) Like Frost's work, many of these poems directly or indirectly address the writing of poetry. How? What do they say?
4) How does Williams construct his speakers? What kind of voice do we find in these poems? How would you characterize his language?
Here's Brueghel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which is what Williams based his poem on of the same name:
I can see how Williams' works interrelate with painting and photography. "The Red Wheelbarrow" evokes this vibrant image with a use of color that helps bring this image to life of a red wheelbarrow sitting on a farm in the rain. Also, as pointed out in the blog, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an interpretation of a painting.
ReplyDeleteAs far as his usage of simple words, "This is Just to Say" is intriguing. It seems like it is a simple note left for someone's spouse or maybe roommate. However, it almost has this mocking tone. It's as if the speaker knows the plums were being saved, and they left the note to irritate the reader. The last lines of "they were delicious so sweet and so cold" gave me that impression.
In his poetry, Williams often focuses on a small, simple subject (such as the wheelbarrow in "The Red Wheelbarrow" or the plums in "This is Just to Say") to make a larger point. This can give the illusion of simplicity in his work, but it's in this simplicity that he makes us think just as much as-if not more than-some extensive epos.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite poems by Williams is "The Fall of Icarus. Rather than writing a poem detailing the myth of Icarus, Williams draws our attention to the smaller things that are going on at the same time: "it was spring"; "a farmer was ploughing"; etc. You know how people often ask you, "Where were you when the Twin Towers were destroyed?" Or they ask your grandparents, "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" Here, Williams asks, "Where were you when Icarus fell?" He gives this remarkable event of literally mythical proportions the backseat to other goings-on; the manner of the sea and the season. In Brueghel's painting, the drowning Icarus likewise takes a backseat to the plowing farmer and the lush spring landscape in the foreground.
I noticed a similar strategy in his other poems. Rather than focusing on the epic "stuff of great poems" themes like time, death, and so on, Williams gives us a concrete image-a wheelbarrow, some plums, or what have you-and lets us do the work. He seems to emphasize that too often a simple but remarkable object can become overshadowed by those tired old themes that seem ever present in modern poetry. Why write about "Death" or "Time" or "Human Folly" when a simple wheelbarrow can say just as much? Why write about the tired old legend of Icarus when a pastoral landscape can say just as much?
-Jon
Out of Williams' poetry I found that i was drawn to two particular poems; "This is Just to Say" and "Spring and All". The simplicity of the latter expressed a simple thought that the speaker had eaten someone else's plums, however there is this tone of maliciousness; that it was done entirely on purpose with the lines, "and which you were probably saving for breakfast," and "Forgive me they were delicious," as if the speaker wanted to rub in that he enjoyed eating these plums.
ReplyDeleteThe words used in "Spring and All" pulled me in. The images in the third stanza express the death that winter caused with the "...dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines". The adjectives he uses furthers the images with cold wind, sluggish dazed spring, stiff curl, and stark dignity cause a feeling of unwanted yet inevitable change as the season moves to spring. This caused me to wonder if Williams' was just talking about seasons or if he had an underlying idea of maybe poetry changing or anything in our lives for that matter. Maybe that change is unwanted but inevitable.
I think one of the most outstanding things in Williams' poetry is his use of language. The words he uses are simple, often with very few syllables, but the way he places them and introduces their repetition hints at a much more complex use of these words within his poetry. The poem that his language is the most tangible is "Spring and All".
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read this poem what stood out to me the most was the amount of descriptive words Williams used throughout. Almost every noun is preceded by an adjective, sometimes even two or three, or in the case of the bushes, five ("the reddish, purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes"). What is the point of Williams using this kind of language within his poetry? For one, it is a new way of introducing description into a modernist style of writing. While many of Williams' poems are incredibly simplistic, "Spring and All" flips the idea of simplicity, using a complex array of descriptions which surround a seemingly simple topic-the coming of spring in nature. While the actual composition of the words are simple, they are used in a profound way, dragging out the events of the poem in a very descriptive manner. Because of this, what would normally be a cheesy, slightly overdone topic becomes a new, more complex way of looking at transformation and metamorphosis.
I hate to sound naive, but to me Williams’ poetry seems like the observers poetry. He keeps things simple and descriptive. While one could read more into it, I really just like envisioning the passages and whatever narrator is being portrayed. Like with “This is Just to Say,” for me it’s almost like a character outline for someone Williams created. The speaker in that poem is really just gloating. It seems like the character is given this defining moment of where his complete personality is revealed.
ReplyDeleteAnother poem that I found intriguing is “The Young Housewife,” it is some voyeuristic glimpse at a neighbor. I’m curious if the speaker is Williams’ commenting and seemingly infatuated with this housewife or if the speaker is some creation.
The thing I noticed most was that Williams was a very visual writer. The descriptions themselves were actually quite vibrant and seem almost pretty, but the language of the poem takes away from the description and gives a feeling of loss. The narrators describe dead leaves, dead babies, lifelessness, and contagious hospitals. Even "This Is Just To Say" is about loss. One person lost their plums.The use of color creates a sense of unhappiness he uses brown and purple and red, none of which invoke happiness.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, my favorite poem was "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." I agree with J.M. Green about the poem making me think about where I was when epic events ocurred like 9/11 for instance. But I also thought about how a major event for one person, doesn't affect the every day life of others. The farmer didn't stop plowing because Icarus fell and few probably knew that it even happened. In the legend of Icarus disobeying his father was his demise, but did this disobedience and demise effect anyone else? Even after the tragedy of 9/11 the world moved on. It is human nature as strange and sad as it may be.
Of the assigned poems, two stood out to me: "The Young Housewife" and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." They both struck me as very beautiful poems, but closer inspection revealed the technical precision that makes them so. In "The Young Housewife", there are three uses of the personal pronoun "I", one appearing the the final line of each stanza. These were the lines that stood out to me the most. The image of the young woman is powerful, but it is the speaker's limited interaction with the sight of her that makes the poem so poignant and longing.
ReplyDelete"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" also had several lines that grabbed my attention. Some of these were "the whole pageantry," "awake tingling," "sweating in the sun," "a splash quite unnoticed." I think it is the movement of this poem that makes it hard to ignore. There is a certain dynamism that Williams adds to the scene that the painting doesn't have. Somehow, he manages to turn on its head the saying about pictures being worth a thousand words.
I also love that Williams is very careful to point out that Icarus's fall goes completely unnoticed. I don't know why, but this makes it more beautiful.
-Megan Blankenship
Williams’ ability to use the “sister arts” in his poetry helps express his own interpretation of the arts. We all see things and think things differently. For example, when I saw the painting of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, I wanted to at first find where Icarus was. But in Williams’ poem, he is drawing attention to the scenery and how life continues on even when a tragic event is taking place. It’s almost unsettling to realize how insignificant the poem makes us feel because although someone’s life is ending, life not just in humans but in nature as well still continues without interruption. Just as in the painting, the biggest thing is not the drowning of Icarus…it’s the farmer ploughing, the grandiosity of the ocean, etc. and you have to find where Icarus is in the midst of all of that. Likewise, in Williams’ poem, the mentioning of him drowning isn’t until the end. Even the title of both works suggest its insignificance because it says “Landscape WITH the Fall of Icarus…suggesting it is secondary and not as important as the landscape itself. Being able to capture the painting’s essence in his poem shows how well Williams can connect the “sister arts” together. William’s poem also shows his simplicity by the minimalizing of the death of Icarus.
ReplyDeleteTo mention Williams' dealings with the Sister Arts is to be drawn quickly to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a poem that at first glance seems to be of the Imagist tradition, but upon closer inspection appears to take on an entirely different meaning. While the poem is a relatively simple description of the painting (see W.H. Auden's poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts" for what I consider to be a better look at Brueghel's work), some of the Williams' diction seems to sarcastically undermine the overly simplistic tenants of Imagism (perhaps a stab at Pound?). For example, beginning with "According to...," Williams removes himself from responsibility and shifts the blame to Brueghel, who, being dead, clearly cannot dispute the interpretation to follow. The poem even hints at its own self-awareness by noting the egoism of the inanimate sea (i.e. "concerned with itself..."). Williams continues (again, sarcastically) to ask the reader to be suspicious of artistic interpretation, describing Icarus' splash as "unsignificant" [sic] and "unnoticed." However, such a splash cannot be that simple to everyone, for, indeed - it is Icarus drowning. It appears that the poem, then, can at once be read in support of Williams' earlier, "simpler" poems (such as The Red Wheelbarrow) while at the same time imploring the audience to look deeper into what appears to be an impenetrable simplicity.
ReplyDeleteLove,
SCRAM
Okay, I really tried with this poetry. I read everything several times, I read it out loud, I went back to the handout about reading poetry, but I just don't get it. I love picking things apart, but I can't seem to pick this mess apart. I'm also not a visual person, and reading through everyone else's posts I couldn't believe how much imagery people came up with. For me, William's poetry just doesn't evoke any vivid mental portraits. Yes, I can picture the muddy field and the dried out grass (from "Spring and All"), but no I don't find it beautiful or emotionally riveting. I'm really hoping this makes more sense in class tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteEllie W.
I absolutely adore William Carlos Williams' poetry. I am an extremely visual person, and particularly enjoy his use of colors. It's not like things are described in incredible detail--in fact, they are not. Rather, they are described in the scantest of details, having only as much as is needed. His poetry is beautifully portrayed while remaining laconic. He says what he needs to say and not a word more. At first, this seems easy; after all, how can such few words be poetry? After a few reads, though, his poetry becomes increasingly complex, and extremely clever. It's one thing for us to say it's not poetry and it would have been so easy, but at the end of the day, William Carlos Williams was one of the first people to write like this. He was an innovator and is entirely unlike poets before him.
ReplyDeleteIt's always interesting to see people who weren't trained as poets writing as poets, as both Williams and Stevens were. Their goals are far different than a classically trained poet.
I think "The Young Housewife" was one of my favorites. I think it gives a good example of using a simple word, life leaf, that seems to have not much meaning when read in a line by itself. But when juxtaposed with leaf again in anothetr line it takes on something much more. I found it interesting that the narrarator compares the housewife to a falling leaf. He later hears the crackling of the dead leaves on the ground as her runs over them with his car, while he is smiling might I add.
ReplyDelete"Spring And All" also mentions dead leaves wuite a bit. I could see how this poem relates to writing a poem. How spring signifies the new poem after it grows from the lifeless cold.
I think the best two examples of how Williams uses simple language to convey something deeper in in "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just To Say." I think the first line of "Wheelbarrow" says so much about the whole poem. But in "This Is Just To Say," I'm not quite sure what it is about. The narrarator has stolen something precious to someone; but it seems like it was worth it to him because it was so good...
We attempted to cover William Carlos William's poem 'Dead Baby' at the end of class, and didn't quite have enough time. I wanted to add to our discussion about his use of a pyschological landscape concerning grief, and how he used colors to add to the overall tone. I tend to over-analyze things, but I noticed William's distinct use of color (which he does so often throughout his poetry) in this particular poem, and how it contributed to the underlying message/tone/theme of it. He mentions sweeping the floor several times, and with 'floor,' I think of a dull color-- usually brown, or of a grayish hugh. This implies a morbid tone in regards to the baby's passing. He also speaks about the mother's eyes having purple bags underneath them. Here is where I may over-analyze, but I believe the purple tone adds to the realness of the baby's death, in that we attribute a lifeless being as a cold, breathless thing (which we link the color purple to). So I almost believe there to be a double connotation to this color purple, and this loss of life and the grievances it's caused. As for the very last stanza, I feel like "a white model of our lives," focusing on the color white, possibly implies innocence. When a baby dies, it has not yet experienced one part of life, so there is no inherited traits or evil qualities to its character. A baby dies with innocence-- pure and delicate. Therefore we can definitely see that William's poetry was tied with the sister arts (like paintings) from his use of "painting" colorful imagery into his landscapes, whether it was literal or metaphorical.
ReplyDelete-Lauren C.
"The Red Wheelbarrow" exemplifies Williams' ability to incorporate the "three sister arts" through the visual descriptions and the rhythm of the words. The number of syllables in each line determine the rate at which the reader gets through the poem, and Williams creates a kind of cadence for moving along with the words. When you read it aloud, it almost feels like a waltz.
ReplyDeleteHe also uses concrete nouns and adjectives to paint a deceptively simple portrait. Using words like "glazed" invokes artisan skills. "Red" and "white" clearly help the reader to construct a mental picture of the scene. Of all Williams' poems that we read, this one seems to distinctly channel the "three sister arts".
I loved Williams--I know I keep harping back to Raymond Carver and how much I love minimalism, but I just can't help it. It really appeals to me that the surface is so beautifully simple, but that the true meaning requires a close examination of each word penned. "The Dead Baby" I found particularly poignant. The idea that this life which meant so much to the parents is merely a curiosity to everyone else makes it all the more heartbreaking. Not only that, I feel that referring to "it" as "the white model of our lives" while not even giving the baby a gender or a name to provide identification heightens the disconnection we all feel to our infancy, that time when lives were still pure and innocent. There are a lot of things to ponder here--which is why I love it.
ReplyDelete