William Carlos Williams 1883-1963

1. William Carlos Williams1883-1963

2. Biography Aesthetics Reception Texts Red Wheelbarrow The Great Figure This is Just to Say Spring and All The Young Housewife

3. Biography

6. Alfred StieglitzSteerage, 1907

7. Alfred StieglitzThe Terminal, New York, 1892

8. Charles Sheeler,American Landscape, 1930

9. Charles SheelerFord Plant, River Rouge, 1927

10. Charles DemuthMy Egypt, 1927

11. Charles DemuthBuildings, Lancaster, 1930

12. Man Ray The Gift, 1921

13. Man RayLe Violon d'Ingres, 1924

14. Man Ray Black and White, 1926

15. Marcel Duchamp L.H.O.O.Q. 1919

16. Marcel Duchamp Bottle Rack, 1914/64

17. Marcel Duchamp Fountain, 1917

18. Aesthetics

19. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 1951 These were the years just before the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of T.S. Eliot’s 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 Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him.

20. “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, repetition—just as Eliot’s more exquisite work is rehash, repetition in another way of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck—conscious or unconscious—just as there were Pound’s 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!”

21. 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 else’s terms, we are incapable of being anything but our own dupes.

22. 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 disastrously—as in Eliot’s 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 us—and we are hungry.

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

24. Reception

25. Marion Strobel “The Red Wheelbarrow” “is no more than a pretty and harmless statement”

26. Gorham Munson Judging by the results of his theory—the majority of the poems in ‘Spring and All’—the 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.

27. Babette Deutsch People, accustomed to the passionate imagery of Yeats, to Eliot’s 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.

28. 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.”

29. Texts

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

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

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

33. D I depend upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

34. E A red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

35. F I love a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

36. G So much depends upon a red rose glazed with tears beside the white lilies

37. H So much depends upon a red wheel barrow

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

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

41. 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

42. Charles DemuthFigure Five in Gold, 1928

43. 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 “reality”—such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.

44. 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

45. 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

46. “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams”—Kenneth 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.

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. 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.