Exploring New Worlds
A consideration of some poems by William Carlos Williams
Man on the margin, incorrigible maverick, embattled messiah 1883-1963
Paper presented at the Hamilton Literary Society By Jan Colville June 2007
Page 1 of 14 In considering the poetry of William Carlos Williams we will first consider the following:
Dear bill: I’ve made a couple of sandwiches for you. in the icebox you’ll find blueberries, a cup of grapefruit and a glass of cold coffee. 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
Ah, modern poetry you might say. Just prose dressed up as poetry. Say what you want to say. Have a line break anywhere you fancy, and hey presto you have poetry.
Of course you are not saying that. And nor should you. The first five lines: the Dear Bill segment is a note that Floss, the wife of William Carlos Williams, the aforementioned ‘Bill’ wrote to him. Attached it to the fridge, sorry icebox, perhaps with a fridge magnet if there were such things in the 1930’s.
The second: the segment starting with this is just to say, is a poem by Bill himself. And it brings us to the very question of what is poetry? What is modern poetry? Perhaps we might ask the question: when can we say modern poetry started? What is the difference between free verse and prose? Are there varieties of free verse? Does it have rules? Was Bill following them in this little poem? Is the free verse of William Carlos Williams similar to the free verse of Ezra Pound, and TS Eliot for instance? What is the lineage that brings us to
Page 2 of 14 William Carlos Williams in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century? What were the influences on Williams, and what was his influence on modern American poetry, literature, and society in general?
Well I could be enrolling for a PhD to answer all of those here.
So I will have to confine myself to working through some of his short poems with you, and seeking to answer a few of the above questions.
Let’s think about the first five lines above: the fridge note from Flossie and the poem, whose title is actually
this is just to say
This famous, perhaps infamous, poem was published in the mid 1930’s. At that time, already in his fifties, William Carlos Williams, full-time doctor and energetic poet of Rutherford New Jersey was just beginning to emerge from the obscurity to which his anti-poetic style had consigned him. By the end of his life in 1963, however, he would be the recipient of many honours and remain an important influence on American poetry (and on poetry in English generally) for decades afterwards.
Let us now consider exactly what makes these 33 words a ‘poem’. For those bought up on Keats or Wordsworth or Pope or Swift it’s no wonder that many readers thought that Williams was having them on, or was satirising poetry as it had previously been understood.
In fact, however, Williams had a different agenda. He wanted to make poetry out of the particular everyday circumstances in which he lived as a husband, father and doctor. He did not think it was necessary to revisit Greek mythology for his themes. Or to rhapsodise about exotic landscapes with nightingales. He lived right in the middle of an industrial landscape, and like his friends, the painters, Charles Sheeler, and Charles Demuth, he saw beauty and great potential in such material for his art.
As I’ve said already the title - this is just to say - is actually the first line of the poem. So Williams wastes no time. This device is one
Page 3 of 14 much imitated by later modern poets. It is also a rather open statement, as the poet is going to say that a short apology to his wife can be as much a subject for a poem as the most wonderful vista in England’s Lake District.
As is suitable to his theme, Williams uses only the most simple vocabulary, and employs a rhythm that is close to, but not identical with, the patterns of everyday speech. Walt Whitman, with his long quasi-biblical lines had beaten Williams to free verse by some 60 years. (As did the King James Bible in 1611). But Williams was to give this staple of American poetry his own twist. The idea was to release the poem, bit by bit in short lines, so that each component could be savoured. Though he was also fond of the run-on line – enjambment - to those of us who remember our analysis of poetry lessons - Williams also wanted us to consider each line as a unit. Thus we start with I have eaten. Then line by line, what has been eaten and where it was found. In this kind of poetry such specifics are important. The plums were in the ice box being saved for something.
We go on to the next stanza for the realisation that the poet has broken a mild taboo and been a bit selfish. His wife will, quite reasonably, be put out (especially if he does not apologise). In the third stanza he asks for forgiveness, which he hopes will come, at least partly, through the understanding of how enjoyable the experience was: ‘they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold’.
The lineation is important throughout, but never more so than in the last stanza. We need a whole line each to reflect on how ‘sweet’ and how ‘cold’ those plums were and perhaps to realise they could never have been so enjoyable if they were sweet and warm. Clearly too, we need a whole line for the request ‘Forgive me’.
So readers of course might ask: where’s the rhyme? And where’s the rhythm?
One of the great advantages of free verse is its capacity to skip over a number of unstressed syllables and land on some key ones.
Thus we have in the first stanza I have eaten/ the plums/ that were in /the icebox.
Page 4 of 14 Notice how all the most meaningful syllables are stressed, and what a long run of unstressed syllables there is until we land triumphantly on ‘ice’.
The same thing happens in the last stanza. forgive me. they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold’.
Even though this is just to say with its subtle use of lineation and rhythm is something of a free verse classic it is also one of those poems that say so much more than the sum of its words. Reading it as a poem we might surmise that the poet has to write notes to his wife because of frequent absences, or that he stays up late writing poetry, rather than being tucked up in bed with Flossie. To this extent he is apologising for rather more than just eating the plums. The poet is also saying that small sensuous delights such as eating cold plums are important to both husband and wife, or he would not need to apologise. Perhaps there’s a suggestion that this shared sensuousness applies to other aspects of their life as well.
So let us now briefly consider some aspects of the life of William Carlos Williams. As mentioned earlier he was born in 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey and died in 1963. After a traditional education he decided on a career in medicine, and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. In Philadelphia his interest in poetry led him into acquaintance with the poets Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and the painter Charles Demuth, all of whom became his lifelong friends.
After his graduation in 1906, he interned at the old French Hospital in New York City and later at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. His first poems, published at his own expense, appeared in 1909, and shortly afterwards he went abroad to Leipzig where he did postgraduate work in paediatrics.
In Europe he renewed his friendship with Ezra Pound and through him was introduced to the literary life of pre-war London.
After a brief period of travel in Italy and Spain, he returned to Rutherford to marry a local girl, Florence Herman, the “Flossie” of the fridge magnet piece, and indeed of many others, and to begin the practice of medicine.
Page 5 of 14 A very active paediatrician with a wide practice among the industrial population of the region, Williams continued to be a deeply committed poet and a literary man happily caught up in the various cliques, publishing ventures, and general creative ferment that enlivened Greenwich Village in the years of World War I and after. He and Flossie had two sons - William and Paul.
In 1924 he went to Europe again; this time with Flossie for six months; a period of dazzling introductions and exhausting participation in the expatriate life of the movers and shakers of the American ‘lost generation’ and their French counterparts.
Ezra Pound was again his literary guide, along with the young publisher Robert McAlmon, and through them Williams associated with such people as Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Kay Boyle, Man Ray, George Antheil, and members of the French literati.
Williams continued for some years to write prose – short stories, essays, novels, and an autobiography – poetry, and plays. He was quite prolific. In the mid 1950’s he turned over his medical practice to his son William and devoted himself wholly to writing.
In 1949 he was appointed to the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress. But this was withdrawn before he could take it up, partly because of accusations concerned with supposed leftist sympathies, partly because of his old association with Ezra Pound who by then was committed to a psychiatric hospital after having been returned to America to stand trial as a traitor and propagandist for Italian fascism.
In the same year Williams suffered the first of a series of strokes that eventually made him a semi-invalid. But in spite of consequent periods of difficulty with his vision and his speech, he continued to live a vigorous creative life until his death in 1963. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Let us examine some more of that creative life now.
His output was prolific, and among his most well known works are Paterson, published in five volumes between 1948 and 1956. It is a complex work, dense, packed with very unconventional writing. But I’m going to concentrate on some of his well-known shorter poems that are good examples of what many critics call the visual
Page 6 of 14 poetry of William Carlos Williams . Now by visual I don’t mean concrete poetry – poetry of a certain shape such as those couple of poems by Herbert we all studied at school – The Altar, and Easter Wings, that are actually the shape of the subject. I mean poems where both the aural and visual are key elements of the poem.
Let’s look at a lesser known one: St Frances Einstein of the daffodils before we come to a couple that are very famous. And it’s important at this stage to say that Williams was strongly influenced by the modern art of both Europe and America.
ST. FRANCIS EINSTEIN OF THE DAFFODILS On the first visit of Professor Einstein To the United States in the spring of 1921.
“Sweet land” at last! Out of the sea - the Venusrembering wavelets rippling with laughter – freedom for the daffodils! - in a tearing wind that shakes the tufted orchards – Einstein, tall as a violet in the lattice-arbor corner is tall as a blossomy peartree
O Samos, Samos dead and buried. Lesbia a black cat in the freshturned garden. All dead. All flesh they sung is rotten Sing of it no longer – Side by side young and old take the sun together – maples, green and red yellowbells and the vermilion quinceflower
Page 7 of 14 together –
The peartree with foetid blossoms sways its high topbranches with contrary motions and there are both pinkflowered and coralflowered peachtrees in the bare chickenyard of the old negro with white hair who hides poisoned fish-heads here and there where stray cats find them – find them
Spring days swift and mutable winds blowing four ways hot and cold shaking the flowers – Now the northeast wind moving in fogs leaves the grass cold and dripping. The night is dark. But in the night the southeast wind approaches. The owner of the orchard lies in bed with open windows and throws off his covers one by one
This is a fairly early poem, written before he has fully thrown off some poetic traditions. But it is an example of what critics mean when they refer to Williams’ visual text. It is not what this poem looks like on the page that is critical here. It is more how we understand the poem as a whole. Williams was strongly influenced by the modern art of both Europe and America.
We need to react to this poem in the way we might react to a cubist or other abstract paining. When we look at a large abstract painting hanging in an art gallery, we look at the whole, then we look at
Page 8 of 14 parts, then our eye goes backwards and forwards making connections, until in the end we see the whole again.
And this is how we need to understand the Einstein poem. At first reading it is disjointed.
It is always spring time for the mind when great discoveries are made. asserted Williams in a letter to a friend. And in this poem he puts forward the proposition that Einstein should be regarded as a saint, just as much as St Francis of Assisi. It’s a tenuous connection, and the poem itself contain tenuous connections and images in very loose order that the reader must bring together in the way a viewer makes meaning of a cubist paining.
A place must be found for each of these things: Einstein, St. Francis of Assisi, a black cat named Lesbia, a pear tree, peach trees, an old Negro who sets cat-traps, and a man who can’t sleep.
The elements of the poem are presented in a series – in time. But we can only perceive their relationships to one another when they we view them simultaneously – in space.
Just as Cubist painters add the dimension of time to their composition – so presenting in one picture not only perhaps the observed surface of a table, but its undersides, legs, and many possible angular views– Williams adds the dimension of space, thereby establishing a panoramic surface on which everything can be seen at once. The seemingly disparate elements are related if you don’t have to come across them in a linear fashion. So Einstein and St. Francis, whose lives were separated by hundreds of years, become one composite agent of discovery in an actual springtime in this delightful old style garden that also represents the springtime of the mind. The very scattering of the seemingly disparate elements throughout the poem reflects Williams’ theme of connectedness. He shows that we can bring Einstein and St Francis together as St. Francis Einstein of the daffodils.
So we see that for Williams a poem is to be both viewed and heard.
Page 9 of 14 The visual text is a dimension of the poem’s experience which is parallel to its reading. The poem is not complete without both elements.
This is certainly the case with Poem.
Poem
As the cat climbed over the top of
the jamcloset first the right forefoot
carefully then the hind stepped down
into the pit of the empty flowerpot
Like many of his shorter poems this one has both a visual and an aural aspect. The aural is a manipulation of certain consonants which wind precisely through the poem, - c, f, t and p particularly. The precision of the sound pattern is emphasised by the concentration of those consonants in the single stressed word of a given line, cat, top, pit, and empty for instance.
The net result is that in describing the careful movements of the cat, the poem takes and shapes its own purposeful aural movement as well. In the poem as it sits on the page we can almost see the carefully stepping cat and the sound of the poem drives the meaning purposefully forward.
Let us consider just one more poem. Another one of the very famous – perhaps notorious poems. The red wheelbarrow
Page 10 of 14 The red wheelbarrow
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
A first glance a very slight poem, sixteen words, with a very slight subject. And if heard rather than seen would seem to be not of much consequence.
But when seen on the page as four stanzas. Yes, I know it’s a big call to call these four couplets stanzas, but for Williams, stanzas they are, very deliberately, chosen. For Williams, remember, a poem is to be both perceived and read. If you heard the poem you would not know that it was four stanzas. You would hear it as a sentence. You would not know that the word barrow is on a separate line from the word wheel, and the same for rain on one line, and water on another. But the very fact that they are sums up what poetry is and does for Williams.
Williams takes and shapes experience to make it something different. He takes a picture of a rural farmyard, colourful red and white, a wet wheelbarrow glazed by the rain, and chickens just damp, still white. They’re not glazed.
A farmer would know every part of this picture, but could not/ would not utter these sixteen words.
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
If we just say them, they are banal. We would not utter them to the farmer as we paid a visit to his/her farm. But, hammered out on a
Page 11 of 14 typewriter into a thing ‘made’ as Williams would say, and without displacing a single word except typographically, the sixteen words exist in a different zone altogether. A zone where the poetry of William Carlos Williams lives.
So I’ll finish there, with a quote from Henry Whitaker, the University of Iowa:
‘With unusual singleness of purpose, the poems of William Carlos Williams invite us to pay attention. It is not merely that they often celebrate the attentive mind, deplore its absence or urge it on us. When successful, they are themselves dramatic structures of attentive or contactful speech; and that achievement is their primary meaning.’ Whitaker, T.R. (1968) Williams. Twayne Publishers Inc. New York.
Bibliography
Brinnin, J.M. 1963. William Carlos Williams. University of Minnesota
Press. Minneapolis.
Duffy, Bernard. 1986. A Poetry of Presence. University of Wisconsin
Press.
Miller, H.H. (Ed). 1966. William Carlos Williams: a collection of critical essays. Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
Page, G. 2006. Eighty Great Poems. U.N.S.W. Press, Sydney,
Australia.
Sayre, H.M. 1983.The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams.
University of Illinois Press. Urbana.
Tashjian. D. 1978. William Carlos Williams and the American Scene 1920 – 1940. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York. Whitaker, T.R. 1968 Williams. Twayne Publishers Inc. New York.
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Chronology of Williams work.
1919 Williams, William C. Poems (privately printed, 1909)
1913 Williams, William Carlos. The Tempers (London: Elkin
Mathews, 1913).
1917 A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas
Company, 1917). York University Library Special
Collections 5773
1921 Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas
Company, 1921). York University Library Special Collections
4748
1921 Spring and All (1923: New York: Frontier Press, 1970). PS 3545
.I544S7
1932 The Cod Head (Harvest Press, 1932).
1935 An Early Martyr and Other Poems (New York: Alcestis Press,
1935).
1936 Adam & Eve & the City (Peru, Vermont: Alcestis Press, 1936).
1938 Complete Collected Poems (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions,
1938) PS 3545 I544 A17 1938 York University Library
1941 The Broken Span (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941). York
University Library Special Collections 4737
1944 The Wedge (Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1944).
1946 - 58 Paterson (New York: J. Laughlin, 1963). 5 vols., published separately 1946-58. 811.5 W728pa Trinity College Library
1948 The Clouds (Wells College Press and Cummington Press,
1948)
1949 The Pink Church (Golden Goose Press, 1949). York University
Library Special Collections 5832
Page 13 of 14 1954 The Desert Music, and Other Poems (New York: Random
House, 1954). PS 3545 I544D4 Robarts Library
1955 Journey to Love (New York: Random House, 1955). PS 3545
I544J6 Robarts Library
1957 The Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams. Ed. John C.
Thirlwall, in New Directions 16 (1957).
1962 Pictures from Bruegel, and Other Poems (New York: for J.
Laughlin by New Directions, 1962). PS 3545 .I544P45 Trinity
College Library
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