William Carlos Williams 18831963

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William Carlos Williams1883-1963
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• Biography
• Aesthetics
• Reception
• Texts
• Red Wheelbarrow
• The Great Figure
• This is Just to Say
• Spring and All
• The Young Housewife

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Biography
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Alfred StieglitzSteerage, 1907
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Alfred StieglitzThe Terminal, New York, 1892
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Charles Sheeler,American Landscape, 1930
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Charles SheelerFord Plant, River Rouge, 1927
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Charles DemuthMy Egypt, 1927
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Charles DemuthBuildings, Lancaster, 1930
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Man Ray The Gift, 1921
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Man RayLe Violon d'Ingres, 1924
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Man Ray Black and White, 1926
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Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. 1919
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Marcel Duchamp Bottle Rack, 1914/64
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Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917
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Aesthetics
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The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 1951

• These were the years just before the great
  catastrophe to our lettersthe appearance of T.S.
  Eliots The Waste Land. There was heat in us, a
  core and a drive that was gathering headway upon
  the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus,
  the elementary principle of all art, in the local
  conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a
  moment under the blast of Eliots genius which
  gave the poem back to the academics. We did not
  know how to answer him.

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Prologue to Kora in Hell

• But our American prize poems are
  especially to be damned not because of
  superficial bad workmanship, but because they are
  rehash, repetitionjust as Eliots more exquisite
  work is rehash, repetition in another way of
  Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinckconscious or
  unconsciousjust as there were Pounds early
  paraphrases from Yeats and his constant later
  cribbing from the Renaissance, Provence and the
  modern French Men content with the connotations
  of their masters.
• It is convenient to have fixed standards of
  comparison All antiquity! And there is always
  some everlasting Polonius of Kensington forever
  to rate highly his eternal Eliot. It is because
  Eliot is a subtle conformist. It tickles the
  palate of this archbishop of procurers to a
  lecherous antiquity to hold up Prufrock as a New
  World type. Prufrock, the nibbler at
  sophistication, endemic in every capital, the not
  quite (because he refuses to turn his back), is
  the soul of the modern land, the United States!

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In the American Grain

• Americans have never recognized
  themselves. How can they? It is impossible
  until someone invent the ORIGINAL terms. As long
  as we are content to be called by somebody elses
  terms, we are incapable of being anything but our
  own dupes.

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Letter to Kay Boyle, 1932

• A minimum of present new knowledge seems to
  be this there can no longer be serious work in
  poetry written in poetic diction. It is a
  contortion of speech to conform to a rigidity of
  line. It is in the newness of a live speech that
  the new line exists undiscovered. To go back is
  to deny the first opportunity for invention which
  exists. Speech is the fountain of the line into
  which the pollutions of a poetic manner and
  inverted phrasing should never again be permitted
  to drain. . . .
• The forced timing of verse after antique
  patterns wearies us even more and seduces thought
  even more disastrouslyas in Eliots work. But a
  new time that catches thought as it lags and
  swings it up into the attention will be read,
  will be read (by those interested) with that
  breathlessness which is an indication that they
  are not dragging a gunny sack flavored with anise
  around for us to follow but that there is meat at
  the end of the hunt for usand we are hungry.

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• A poem is "a small (or large) machine made of
  words.
  
• 1944

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Reception
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Marion Strobel

• The Red Wheelbarrow is no more than a
  pretty and harmless statement

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Gorham Munson

• Judging by the results of his theorythe
  majority of the poems in Spring and Allthe
  imagination shows its presence by forming
  unexpected, astonishing, novel combinations,
  precisely the type of combination that Poe would
  have named fancy, since it produces the bracing
  effect of difficulties unexpectedly surmounted. .
  . .
• Williams seeks not to establish a natural
  harmonious order which covers wholes but an
  arbitrary composition characterized by
  independence. He is attempting to leap straight
  from contact (sharp perceptions) to the
  imagination (order in the highest sense) without
  working through culture (the attempt to grasp
  reality practically, emotionally and
  intellectually). Thus, to my mind his intense
  effort to expand his primitivism is leading him
  back to sophistication, the sophistication of a
  Parisian cubist painter.

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Babette Deutsch

• People, accustomed to the passionate
  imagery of Yeats, to Eliots suggestive music, to
  the panoplied mysticism of Hart Crane or the rich
  allusiveness of Pound, to name four of the more
  influential poets of our time, will find
  themselves at a loss before this stark and
  unashamed simplicity of statement. For this man
  the object seen, the clear line, the pure color,
  is enough. Or the smudged line, the dirty color,
  if he is looking, as he often must, at the uglier
  realities of city street and town and alley. One
  must come to the poems with his own quick
  response to the sensual world in its concrete
  immediacy.

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Kenneth Burke

• If a man is walking, it is the first
  principle of philosophy to say that he is not
  walking, the first principle of science to say
  that he is placing one foot before the other and
  bringing the hinder one in turn to the fore, the
  first principle of art to say that the man is
  more than walking, he is yearning Then there are
  times when scientist, philosopher, and poet all
  discover of a sudden that by heavens! the man is
  walking and none other. Williams is this kind
  of poet, he likes Contact.

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Texts
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A

• So much depends
• upon
• a red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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B

• Not much depends
• upon
• a red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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C

• The fate of the world depends
• upon
• a red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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D

• I depend
• upon
• a red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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E

• A red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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F

• I
• love
• a red wheel
• barrow
• glazed with rain
• water
• beside the white
• chickens

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G

• So much depends
• upon
• a red
• rose
• glazed with
• tears
• beside the white
• lilies

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H

• So much depends
• upon
• a red wheel
• barrow

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I

• So much depends upon a red wheel barrow
• Glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

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J

• So
• much
• depends
• upon a red wheelbarrow
• glazed with rain
• water beside
• the white
  chick- ens

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The Great Figure

• I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of
  a fire engine passing the end of the street down
  Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a
  golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The
  impression was so sudden and forceful that I took
  a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a
  short poem about it.
• Autobiography

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Charles DemuthFigure Five in Gold, 1928
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Spring and All, 1923

• What I put down of value will have this value
  an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation
  of strained associations, complicated ritualistic
  forms designed to separate the work from
  realitysuch as rhyme, meter as meter and not
  as the essential of the work, one of its words.

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• This Is Just to Say
• 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

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Jist ti Let Yi No

• ahv drank
• thi speshlz
• that wurrin
• thi frij
• n thit
• yiwurr probbli
• hodn back
• furthi pahrti
• awright
• they wur great
• thaht stroang
• thaht cawld
• Tom Leonard

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Variations on a Theme by William Carlos
WilliamsKenneth Koch

• 1
• I chopped down the house that you had been saving
  to live in next summer.
  
• I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing
  to do and its wooden beams were so inviting.

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• 2
• We laughed at the hollyhocks together
• and then I sprayed them with lye.
• Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

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• 3
• I gave away the money that you had been saving to
  live on for the next ten years.
  
• The man who asked for it was shabby
• and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy
  and cold.

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• 4
• Last evening we went dancing and I broke your
  leg.
  
• Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
• I wanted you here in the wards, where I am a
  doctor.