Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams

1. Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams English 11 HOnors

2. Ezra Pound • Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. • His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome."

3. In a Station of the MetroThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough. • The Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." • Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and "careless thinking" of Georgian Romanticism. • Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. • For example, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.

4. Francescaby Ezra Pound You came in out of the night And there were flowers in your hand, Now you will come out of a confusion of people, Out of a turmoil of speech about you. I who have seen you amid the primal things Was angry when they spoke your name IN ordinary places. I would that the cool waves might flow over my mind, And that the world should dry as a dead leaf, Or as a dandelion see-pod and be swept away, So that I might find you again,

5. A major supporter of the Symbolist movement in the United States was the poet Ezra Pound, a member of the “Lost Generation,” who had first encountered this movement as an expatriate in Paris. • Pound’s movement in America eventually came to be known as Imagism and was marked by use the language of common people, the influence of Eastern poetic forms (particularly the haiku), adherence to the poetic form introduced by Walt Whitman called free verse, and the use of subject matter that had formerly not been considered suitable for poetic pursuits.

6. “Ballad of Mulberry Road” • http://www.teachervision.fen.com/images/audio/poems/balladmulberryroad.mp3 • As you listen to the following poem, write down images that come to your mind.

7. Elements of Pound’s Poems • attacked the prevailing verse styles of his time, which he found flabby and vague. • “free verse,” • three essential elements: the play of image, music, and meaning. • he advanced a poetry stripped of all nonessential elements, where every word makes a necessary contribution to the poem

8. second approach that Pound took to poetry, early in his career, was the use of masks or personae (Personae is the title he gave to his collection of shorter poems). • Rather than the poem representing the voice of the author, as in much lyric poetry, the speaker in Pound’s persona poems is a made-up character with whom Pound did not completely identify. • This allowed Pound to be satiric, even sarcastic, not only about the subject of the poems but about their speaker, although he sometimes appears to share the sentiments of the poem’s persona, making for an interesting ambiguity.

9. William Carlos Williams • He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing. • WCW was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. • Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.

10. This Is Just To SayI have eaten the plumsthat were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

11. What could it mean??? • The nonessential story/myth goes: Williams (a doctor) was called to the bedside of a terminally ill young girl. After realizing there was nothing he could do to save her, nothing more he could do to lessen her suffering, Williams sat in a corner of the child's room and looked out the window. There he saw a red wheel barrow out in the yard, probably under a grey sky (but maybe whipped by sprinkler water instead of rain)... I remember reading one old philosopher who, at the end of a long academic life, expressed a relevant revelation (something along the lines of) "I realized our most fundamental relationship with existence is not intellectual, or spiritual, (or technological)... but entirely physical."

12. Variations on a Theme by William Carlos WilliamsKenneth KochI 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 doand its wooden beams were so inviting.We laughed at the hollyhocks togetherand then I sprayed them with lye.Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.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 shabbyand the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.Forgive me. I was clumsy andI wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor! • http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~richie/poetry/html/poem191.html

13. The Young Housewife by William Carlos Williams At ten AM the young housewifemoves about in negligee behindthe wooden walls of her husband's house.I pass solitary in my car.Then again she comes to the curbto call the ice-man, fish-man, and standsshy, uncorseted, tucking instray ends of hair, and I compare herto a fallen leaf.The noiseless wheels of my carrush with a crackling sound overdried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

14. Breaking the poem apart • One also must do a sort of double-take to figure out how the speaker could know this if she is behind the walls of a house. • Though the standard line on Williams is that he freezes moments of perception (language used to render perceptive instants), this poem. • The first stanza describes a moment when the speaker passes "solitary." Is he on his way back in the second stanza which begins "Then again . . ." or is this possibly a fantasy on his part? • In relation to the only, self-consciously stated, image: what are we to make of the implicit connection between the woman as a leaf and the leaves crushed by the car's wheels? • Is the woman something crushed or discarded? • All of these questions, as well as the implicit motion of the speaker who is driving by in a car, tend to place the interlocking phrases and descriptions in a kind of metaphorical suspension. Underlying this suspension of what is, after all, a small drama, has to be the speaker's unstated desire for the woman. Once again, the poet's desire structures the details, progress, and interrelation of elements in the poem.