Customer Reviews

The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The overall strength of Williams' work lies in his power to summon image from where there was previously nothing.

Forget about the conventional tactics of poetry (meter, rhyme, etc.). Williams effectively occupies the outer regions of the land which is not prose. His power always properly lay in the simple yet vivid images (visual, aural, tactile, etc.) behind the words.

I'm not going to attempt to talk about WCW's poetry or I could be writing for hours... rather this review is about the volume of "collected" poems as a book to read. Yes it includes some dubious items and some debris we would expect from any serious and innovative writer... but there are mostly successes here and well worth reading. Especially informative is observing WCW's development as a writer and thinker and his daring as a poet and his striving for new ways to express the response of an artist to the swelling tide of modernity and cultural failures of the 20th century.

Whew, check out that list. This is the foundation of Williams' art, for fans of his selected & Pictures from Brughel.

This is the development of Williams' daily art, fine poems punctuated by an occasional masterpiece or near-surrealistic gemstone. Someone once asked John Cage, "With your methods, couldn't anyone compose music?" Cage replied, "Yes, but they don't." Many of Williams' poems make that impression. Where I live, in New Jersey, Williams is so ingrained in the literary landscape that no poet is more imitated, even if the imitator is unaware of the influence. Williams was better at setting examples than at explaining methods. He learned & invented as he wrote, & I suspect his talk & his letters had a great deal more influence than his occasional stabs at poetics.

Williams stripped down American poesy & reconstructed it as a form of talk, which it had been all along beneath Whitman's yawping & Dickinson's obsessive editing & Frost hiking though New England snow five steps at a time. Like all great American originals, he didn't know he was supposed to be a somebody-else; maybe a Stephen Benet, a William Vaughn Moody, an Edwin Arlington Robinson, all big literary stars in their time but not now counted in the first ranks of our poets.

This is roughly the first half of The Doc's amazin' journey. You'll know if you need it. Any intelligent poet friend will love it as a gift.

I bought this volume and volume 2. Carlos William Carlos was definitely ahead of his time. But I can say except for The Red Wheelbarrow and a few other poems, that he was a radical. I can't say I'm a big fan. Some of the poems were awful the others were just wierd!

How can one describe William Carlos Williams, a great brilliant writer. His words are so in depth and so meaning and can relate to any particular situation one might be in. His use of language is superior above others. Not until recently did I read something of his in a collection of poems that I had borrowed, and I saw one poem that stuck out to me. This poem is called Romance Moderne. This is a truly excellent poem and led me to be such a great admirer of William Carlos Williams. I've borrowed his collection of poems almost a thousand times from the library, and I still haven't finished reading all of his poems. It takes a necessary amount of time to soak in his words, and with such a great number of poems, I'd like to soak them all in, thus I will be buying the book for myself to have.

I don't know what it is about WCW that just makes me want to puke. Perhaps it's his nice-guy, nice "poet" pretensions. I do see the sense in those aphorisms about which he was constantly pontificating: "No ideas but in things", "For there to be a new mind, there must be a new line" (sic). I do see the technical innovations in such poems as "Iris" or "The Red Wheelbarrow", how the enjambment for which he's famous serves to direct the eye and the mind to things which you would not have noticed had these prose poems been unchopped: "So much depends

Upon

A red wheel

Barrow,

Glazed with rain

Water

Beside the white

Chickens."

Very nice. The vivid white of the chickens and the shining-glass image of the water that "glazes" (one of WCW's favorite words) the wheelbarrow is imbued with immediacy and novelty: fresh experiences with commonplace things. That's great.

However, I have trouble with his "variable foot". (Employed, for example, in a poem called, I believe, "Mr. T" though not of A-Team fame.) The whole point of meter is to emulate the measure-bars in music: a constant beat to which the tune may be set. However, the triadic line sporting his variable feet, ostensibly to account for the "rapidity of American speech", just doesn't work. The only way for it to work is if you were reading Mr. T, or if the speaker gave infinitesimally shorter pauses between the triad-fragments so that the listener can detect the difference between a line-break and a pause separating the feet. WCW focused so much on the visual aspect of his poems that it makes you wonder, as a formalist friend of mine once put it, why he bothered to read his poems at all: why didn't WCW just give slideshows? On top of that, WCW had the gall to assault formalist poetry: I quote to the best of my recollection: "The sonnet is the form of the tyrant" and "You cannot write a sonnet without making gestures of loyalty to the court of Elizabeth I." In response to some of the garbage being spouted by WCW, both on the page and otherwise, Dylan Thomas once referred to WCW as one of the modern poets who was responsible for the Death of the Ear. And, hearing about all his arty posturings, I imagine how WCW would stand up to the likes of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings, and the other Movement poets, who would have lit into him like Alex's droogs in Burgess' _A Clockwork Orange_. Too bad they never met.