Professor Langdon
Hammer: I'm going to talk
about William Carlos Williams
today.
It may be that I end up
carrying a little bit of
Williams over to next time--to
Marianne Moore,
his friend, contemporary,
and really close collaborator,
in a sense, in the New York
scene of modernism in the teens,
twenties, thirties,
forties, and on into the
fifties.
This is the man,
as a young man,
William Carlos Williams.
If you open your anthologies to
page 284, in the long and useful
head-note that Jahan Ramazani
provides you,
there's this quotation from a
letter in the middle of page 284
that Williams wrote to Harriet
Monroe,
the editor of Poetry
whom thirteen years later Hart
Crane would write to in defense
of his poem,
"At Melville's Tomb."
 
And Williams says in this
letter to Monroe:
Most current verse is
dead from the point of view of
art… [It's dead,
it's lifeless;
and what Williams cares about
is something he calls "life."]
Now life is above all things
else at any moment subversive of
life as it was the moment before
[and I think that's how we know
it in Williams's life:
whatever is subverting whatever
was a moment before.
 
And subversive is probably an
important and suggestive word
there]--always new,
irregular.
[He wants what is new,
and what is new is going to be
what is irregular,
and what is irregular has in
some sense subverted what was in
place before.
He continues.]
Verse to be alive [to have what
Pound, I think,
would have called "the
impulse"]
must have infused into it
something of the same order [it
has to have life in it,
or what he calls]
some tincture of
disestablishment,
something in the nature of an
impalpable revolution,
an ethereal reversal,
let me say.
I am speaking of modern
verse.
Like certain of our other
poets, Williams is
self-consciously modern.
He's defining what "modern"
means, and he's defining it as a
quality of experience that he
calls "life,"
that has the quality of
disrupting whatever was in
existence before.
 
And this is a quality and
energy that he wants to have in
his poetry itself.
 
This is Williams a little bit
older, Williams in 1924,
when he has established himself
through the poems in a volume
called Spring and All,
as one of the major modern
poets in America.
 
He is the author of a poem –
have you ever seen it?
– called "The Red
Wheelbarrow."
And that might be a good place
to begin.
That's on pages 294 to 295.
 
Of course, I'm joking.
 
Probably that's the one poem
everybody in this class has read
before they came to this class.
 
It is better known than "The
Negro Speaks of Rivers" or
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening," even.
It is also distinguished,
I think, as being the second
shortest modern poem after "In a
Station of the Metro,"
a poem that it's related to in
certain ways.
In fact, a link between
Williams and Pound is important,
it's relevant.
Pound was a friend and rival
for Williams throughout his
career.
Williams is sometimes seen in
his early stages as a kind of
Imagist or at any rate as a poet
influenced by the Imagist
aesthetic.
Imagism is, of course,
a visual metaphor,
and Williams is above all a
visual poet, a poet of the eye.
 
so much depends upon a
red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens.
Well, I think you have to see
that poem to start to really be
able to read it.
It, I think,
probably does involve some
subtle vocal and auditory
experience,
but it's first of all a poem
that meets you and challenges
you through the eye,
as a visual object in some
sense on the page.
The kind of seeing that
Williams's poems call for is--we
can think of it as a way of
reading that his poems
themselves demand.
 
In other words,
there's a kind of link between
how he sees the world and the
way in which he asks us to read
him.
His poems model a kind of
seeing.
Unlike "In a Station of the
Metro," "The Red Wheelbarrow,"
or let me call it instead "So
Much Depends," is a poem without
a title.
This title, "The Red
Wheelbarrow," was like the title
"This is Just to Say" in the
poem that follows,
the almost equally famous poem.
 
These are titles Williams added
later to his work.
In Spring and All--that
volume, the first edition,
1923 – the poem appears
simply as a text on the page.
And that's important.
 
It's part of--it's as important
as the title is for "In a
Station of the Metro."
 
Simply presenting the poem on
the page to us,
as Williams does,
doing without a title,
Williams asks us to,
in some sense,
read and encounter this poem
without a frame,
without some kind of
pre-established boundary or
explanatory introduction or
entry.
That choice increases the
immediacy of our experience.
It's as if Williams were asking
you to kind of press up close to
the poem, face it,
just as he is facing the thing
he is writing about;
or asks us to face not the
thing that he's writing about so
much as his act of writing and
seeing, his act of writing as it
embodies a way of seeing.
The poem has a suggestion that
it requires as a poem the same
kind of calm intensity of
concentration that the poet's
observation of the wheelbarrow
exemplifies.
So again, I think the kind of
seeing that the poem does models
a way of reading.
 
Well, what is that way of
reading?
How does the poem embody in its
construction – which it calls
attention to – how does it
embody in its construction a
mode of perception,
a way of seeing?
How has Williams organized this
language on the page,
by what principles?
 
Looking at it,
well, as I suggested before,
it's not a poem,
I think, that we begin by
hearing,
and we have to start reading it
and seeing it before we can even
think about how to really speak
it properly.
It is not a metrical poem.
This is not iambic pentameter.
 
It is a free verse poem.
 
In the prologue to Kora In
Hell, which is the prose I
asked you to read for today at
the back of the book,
there are a number of sentences
and ideas that are important.
I'll call attention to just a
few.
On page 958,
Williams says,
"Nothing is good save the new.
 
 
 
If a thing have novelty,
it stands intrinsically beside
every other work of artistic
excellence.
If it have not that,
no loveliness or heroic
proportion or grand manner will
save it."
And he identifies here,
as elsewhere,
this property of novelty with a
kind of verse that eschews rhyme
and meter,
a whole host of existing poetic
conventions.
Again, in the head note to the
Williams selection,
there's a quotation from
Williams on the subject of meter
on page 285 from his prose
statement,
"The Poem as a Field of Action."
He says:
I propose sweeping
changes from top to bottom of
the poetic structure….
I say we are through with the
iambic pentameter as presently
conceived, at least for dramatic
verse;
through with the measured
quatrain, the staid
concatenation of sounds in the
usual stanza,
the sonnet.
So much for "The Silken Tent,"
Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens,
et cetera.
Williams is insisting that
modern verse,
the kind of verse he describes,
has to break with these models
and has to proceed by patterns
that it itself invents.
Free verse is in that sense
Williams's chosen medium;
free verse meaning a poem not
patterned by metrical scheme or
rhyme, or indeed some other,
in a sense, pre-existing
principle or pattern.
 
Nonetheless,
free verse does always have
some kind of operative pattern,
sometimes very strict and
structuring ones,
and this short poem is a good
example.
In fact, as you examine it,
you see a series of four
stanzas, four two-line groups
– since Williams might not
like the word "stanza" – four
two-line groups.
And the pattern is long-short,
three or four syllables
followed by two.
And this is itself almost like
a metrical or rhyme scheme.
In fact, you could say this
poem is more strict than a
sonnet, that it's more limited
in the range of choices that it
allows.
It isn't, however,
presented to us as sonnets are,
as an instance of a received
verse form that is at least in
its general pattern invariant
and again pre-existing.
 
Instead, the poem presents
itself as a kind of ad-hoc
arrangement, as a kind of
structure that the poet has
chosen to work within,
reflecting the contingencies of
this moment, the occasion,
the poem's purpose.
The poem's shape – and this
is one reason it's hard to
speak, it's hard to hear –
organizes Williams's speech in a
manner that disregards or
disrupts normal familiar syntax.
It does so specifically through
enjambment, by carrying one line
over to the next.
 
Williams's enjambments have
here, as throughout his poetry,
the effect of breaking up
language: breaking it up;
forcing us to,
in fact, slow down our reading;
to stop taking language's
sense-making for granted;
and, in a sense,
to get into the poem.
The white space in a Williams's
poem is--you can think of it as
a space for thought,
a space where we are invited,
allowed, required to think
about choices,
to ask ourselves about what
possible connections can be made
at a given moment.
 
In this poem Williams
specifically breaks words up
into their component parts –
wheel,
barrow, rain,
water – without hyphens,
as if what he was looking at
– a red wheelbarrow –
consisted of those three terms:
redness,
the wheel, the barrow.
 
These are its component
elements.
He points out,
in effect, in this device,
how in this case two nouns that
are made of compounds –
they're really compounds –
represent things that are
compounds,
things that are made up of
other things that have parts.
 
As he establishes this pattern,
"so much depends / upon / a red
wheel / barrow / glazed with
rain / water,"
you want to carry it forward,
don't you – now that we've
learned what he's doing – into
the next stanza,
'beside the white / chickens,"
as if "white chickens" were the
same kind of compound as
"rainwater" and "red
wheelbarrow."
But they're not quite,
and Williams is,
in a way, teasing us.
White chickens aren't made up
of "white"-ness and
"chicken"-ness in the same way
that a wheelbarrow is made up of
a "wheel" and a "barrow."
 
He's doing something a little
different here.
No sooner has he,
in effect, established a
certain pattern of cognition –
showed us how to read his
enjambments – than he breaks
that pattern.
He revises how it works.
 
It's just been put in place and
now it's changed and in fact
it's over, it's done.
 
The poem is done.
 
If the first lines of the poem
and the first stanzas are,
in a sense, made to interrupt
and disrupt and thereby freshen
our habits of seeing,
to make us see these things in
some new way,
this last stanza does away with
the habit of seeing that the
poem itself has just
constructed,
just introduced us to.
Williams prevents us from
settling into a convention of
perception, even in a poem that
is as small and as brief as this
one.
There's really only enough time
in the poem's essentially
introduction and three parts
following to establish a pattern
and break it.
What this brief moment of
heightened perception allows us
to see, to experience,
is something small and large.
What is it that depends on the
red wheelbarrow?
Williams only says "so much,"
"so much."
The idea is,
I think, the beautiful one that
the world, when it's glazed with
rain water--it's a kind of
aesthetic effect,
an aesthetic effect that
implies a light that does the
glazing, that's somewhere behind
our shoulders and the poet's,
as he looks at these objects,
this light, which comes after
rain and is a product of change,
of the energy of the world as
it transforms;
suddenly allows this world to
be seen in visible detail,
apprehensible in its component
parts;
and the ordinary gestalt
of perception is interrupted,
freshened and re-oriented.
 
We see something,
something ordinary,
newly and freshly.
 
It stands out.
And what we see in miniature in
the limited space of the moment,
or of the poem,
is a world, well,
what we see is the elements out
of which the world is made,
elements ordinarily held in a
kind of complex mutual
dependency: a kind of complex of
relations that we simply take
for granted in the words that we
use and in the way that we see
things,
just as we put together "wheel"
and "barrow" and "rain" and
"water," without thinking about
it.
What the red wheelbarrow holds,
then, and what in that sense
depends on it is something
pretty heavy,
and that is the sense of a
whole world;
or better, the sense of the
world in its wholeness,
which is something affirmed in
this attractively modest,
momentary, poetic perception.
 
So much for "The Red
Wheelbarrow."
Spring and All:
and there's that idea again,
in the title,
spring as a season of newness:
for Williams,
beginning his career,
spring registering his own
beginnings, registering
modernness,
a vision of the world in its
newness.
Well, Spring and All is
a beautiful book,
and one I wish I could show
you,
but the last time I saw it at
the Beinecke it disappeared and
no one has seen it in a couple
of years.
They have a lot of paper over
there.
I guess it's easy to lose
things.
Maybe it's available again,
we'll look and see.
 
It's a beautiful,
plain book, robin's egg blue
for spring, I suppose.
 
It seems--it's not large;
it's small.
It almost has no ornament.
 
In all of this,
it seems to exemplify the
American virtues of plainness
and directness and simplicity;
again, a long way from Hart
Crane.
And the book is really so
American that it was published
in Dijon.
Williams is a polemically
American poet,
even more than Crane in certain
ways,
more than Frost even,
and yet Williams has a very
important and vital relationship
to European modernism and to
French modernism in particular,
and more particularly to French
painting.
And to understand how Williams
is writing, what he's trying to
get at, it's helpful to remember
what he was looking at.
Here's a Braque,
Georges Braque,
1908.
It's on the way to cubism and,
I think, sort of helpfully on
the way to cubism because it
looks back to a realist
tradition with its,
in a sense, conventional,
perspectival space that's yet
being broken up into planes,
that allow us to register the
painting as a painting,
that force us to,
really.
And I suppose even more
striking is this:
one of many great late Cezanne
paintings of Le Mont
Sainte-Victoire where here,
again, the perspectival space
of the painting is being turned
into almost a kind of abstract
field of color patterns.
Again, these are painters
interested in foregrounding
their action of seeing through
the ways in which they
foreground self-consciously the
materiality of the medium in
which they are working.
 
The aim in postimpressionist
painting, and then in cubism,
really, is to again break up
that gestalt of
perception that Williams is also
opposing himself to:
to break it up and grasp,
in some sense,
the dynamism in the world
before us, precisely through
acts of seeing that call
attention to themselves and to
the way in which that seeing is
rendered.
If you have read the prologue
to Kora in Hell,
which starts on page 954,
you know that Williams begins
with an anecdote about Marcel
Duchamp, part of the New York
art world that Williams also
participated in through his
friend,
the dealer and taste maker
Walter Arensberg:
"Once when I was taking lunch
with Walter Arensberg… I asked
him if he could state what the
more modern painters were
about…" And then he gives
several as examples,
including Duchamp,
all of whom were then in New
York, and:
[Arensberg]
replied by saying that the only
way man differed from every
other creature was in his
ability to improvise novelty
and,
since the pictorial artist was
under discussion,
anything in paint that is truly
new,
truly a fresh creation is good
art.
Thus, according to Duchamp,
who was Arensberg's champion at
the time, a stained glassed
window that had fallen out and
lay more or less together on the
ground was a far greater
interest than the thing
conventionally composed in
situ.
Which is an interesting model
for what Williams himself might
be seen as doing in poetry,
that in some sense he's taking
the stained glass window and
seeing it laid out on the floor,
maybe broken on the floor.
Duchamp painted this famous
work, Nude Descending a
Staircase,
and it is clearly all about
here rendering in pictorial form
the kind of multiframe vision
that photography and motion
pictures allow us to see,
to again here grasp in
representation some sense of the
movement and energy that compose
the world that we see before us.
The other dimension of the
Duchamp anecdote that's nice,
and about Williams is telling,
is that a stained glass window
that has fallen out is something
you come upon or find.
And Duchamp is,
of course, most famous for his
– let me turn to the next
image – his ready-mades.
This a facsimile of the--or
that is another version of his
most famous ready-made fountain,
a urinal, which he signed with
the pseudonym,
R.
Mutt 1917, and presented as a
work of art.
The Art Gallery has this work.
 
This too is,
as it were, a facsimile of the
original, now lost:
a snow shovel,
another ready-made;
this one with the excellent
title, In Advance of the
Broken Arm.
Duchamp takes postimpressionism
to New York in the form of dada
– a movement with its
importance for Williams,
too, including,
I think, Duchamp's
mischievousness and his
willingness to provoke the
subversive – to take
Williams's word – and to play
with expectations about what
constitutes art,
as Williams in certain ways
would play with our expectations
about what could constitute a
poem or poetic statement.
In New York and elsewhere,
Williams is in contact with a
whole range of modernist
American artists influenced by
the European art I've just been
talking about,
but also working in a
distinctively American mode.
This is a work by Charles
Demuth, 1921.
I'm sorry, I'm behind on
producing my image lists but
I'll get those for you.
 
And here's another.
 
And again here:
an urban scene,
that is realist in its mode of
representation,
and yet the foregrounding of
the lines created by the
different shapes of the
buildings call attention to this
as indeed a kind of constructed
image that seems to be moving
out of the realm of realist
representation to something more
symbolic and certainly avowedly
created by the artist.
Demuth goes further in the same
direction in what is probably
his best known work.
 
This is called The Great
Figure Number 5.
If Williams was busy looking at
these artists I've just been
talking about,
they also were looking at him,
and Demuth's painting is a
tribute to Williams and a little
homage;
also, I think,
a little joke about Williams's
own poem, also from Spring
and All, that we know as
"The Great Figure" on page 291.
 
 
Well, I'll read this;
again, rain and light:
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red firetruck
moving
with weight and urgency
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
And this is Demuth's rendering
of that moment that draws out
the way in which the poem finds
and makes an exalted symbol from
this ordinary perception,
and it's got "Bill" up top,
and "W.C.W." down in the
bottom, and "Carlos" underneath
the 5, as part of this friendly
tribute.
The poem's interesting to look
at next to "The Red
Wheelbarrow."
Here's something else that's
red, right?
And again, the poem is
concerned with a moment of
perception.
Here, the poem really tries to
render the process by which
perception takes place,
or rather the kind of context
in which it does,
which "The Red Wheelbarrow"
doesn't.
"The Red Wheelbarrow" really
kind of takes something seen,
almost fragmented,
out of a continuum of
perception that we can feel
implied but isn't made explicit
in the poem.
In this case,
we are given the kind of
context out of which a detail,
something arbitrary,
contingent, and ordinary,
springs out;
springs out of the rush of
things and catches the eye and
the imagination and the
intention of the poet.
 
"In a Station of the Metro" is
a poem about metropolitan,
urban perception.
 
So, is this poem.
 
Here, instead of a present
moment that's briefly suspended,
as in Pound's poem or as in "So
Much Depends,"
this poem is just as much about
memory in the rush of ongoing
experience, of a kind of ongoing
temporality figured here by the
firetruck "moving" – and
there's that participial word,
"moving" – a kind of ongoing
action.
In the midst of this,
something catches the poet's
attention.
He acts as a perceiver.
He says "I saw" in that action,
expressed in a verb in the past
tense;
intervenes in and cuts into
this blurry, perceptual,
participial flow of things that
is the fire truck rushing by.
 
It fixes on a figure,
in this case a number,
and carries that away and out
of the experience.
That "5" on the fire truck,
it's something utterly ordinary
like a wheelbarrow or a shovel,
a snow shovel,
and it's a kind of found
object.
And yet here for Williams--he
makes something of it,
or plays with the act of making
something with it.
It is something he calls,
with some joking,
some seriousness,
"the great figure":
a great figure,
a symbol.
But a symbol of what exactly?
 
Well, perhaps a symbol of the
very capacity of the ordinary to
arrest our attention and become
significant, become objects of
perception;
perhaps a symbol of the five
senses themselves.
 
What do you think?
 
That seems possible, too.
 
The five senses whose powers
are behind, for Williams,
the way we create figurative
language,
the way we create figures and
poems and discover symbols and
discover meaning in the world
around us: "Now life is above
all things else at any moment
subversive of life as it was the
moment before – always new,
irregular."
The poem that's placed just
after this in the anthology is
one of Williams's greatest and
it,
too, as it appears in the
volume Spring and All has
no title but is given a title
here – the title of the volume
itself – but was known rather
for a long time simply by its
first line,
"By the road to the contagious
hospital."
The poem is about the continual
newness that Williams calls
life, something that's
continually constructing the
world around us.
And the poet in this poem gets
at it – like the
postimpressionist painter,
even perhaps like the dadaist
– by calling his and our
attention to the act of
constructing his poem,
and in particular as that
construction is felt,
as it's kind of brought to our
consciousness through
enjambment.
Williams's poetry,
like the world he sees,
is constantly enjambed,
segmented, renewed by that act.
Let's look at how enjambment
works here.
By the road to the
contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast--a cold wind.
 
Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds,
standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked,
upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under
them
leafless vines --
Lifeless [again,
dead]
in appearance,
sluggish
dazed spring approaches [that
is the first verb in the poem]
–
They [he now says,
suggesting all of these things]
enter the new world
naked, cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.
 
All about them [these things,
the things of the
world]
the cold, familiar wind --
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot
leaf
One by one objects are defined
[like a series of Imagist
poems]--
It [now not "they" but "it,"
which is again now here a world
felt in its
wholeness]
quickens: clarity,
outline of leaf
But now the stark dignity of
entrance-- Still,
the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to
awaken.
It's a great poem,
and enjambment is a key part of
its energy.
The first enjambment that is
striking, is bold – it's one
of the really famous ones,
in fact, in modern poetry –
is that second line,
"under the surge of the blue."
 
It invites us to read "the
blue" as a noun,
and to feel and hear that
phrase,
"the surge of the blue," as a
kind of conventional expression
of lyric romantic exaltation.
 
But we're wrong.
"Blue" is an adjective,
and we learn this as the poem
turns and the enjambment
supplies the information that
this blue,
this kind of exalted thing is
actually "mottled," marred or
flawed, even,
in some sense.
And here the newness that the
poem is going to celebrate is
going to be something we might
feel mottled – that is,
cold, flawed – which is part
of its claim to be new,
part of its claim to represent
something really real;
not to be found in previous
books of poetry,
but something to be found in
the living.
So, at this moment it seems
enjambment means
disestablishment,
that word of Williams's,
the subversion of life as it
just was, a surprise of
perception.
But as in "The Red
Wheelbarrow," if you think we've
now learned what enjambment
means in a given context,
Williams is going to do
something else.
The next lines are also sharply
enjambed: "mottled clouds driven
from the / northeast--a cold
wind.
Beyond, the / waste of broad,
muddy fields."
That is itself a bold thing to
have done in poetry,
to break off a line at the
definite article.
 
I'm not sure that there's an
example in poetry previously to
align these examples of lines
ending in "the" with.
There may well be,
but it's yet a novel and bold
thing for Williams to do.
 
But it works differently from
the previous example where the
"blue" invited us to read that
phrase as a kind of noun,
expressive of romantic
exaltation, and then gave us the
surprise that no,
it doesn't function that way,
and what you thought was pure
and exalted is in fact mottled
and messy.
These enjambments don't have
any kind of interpretive
surprise like that.
The lines are just broken that
way.
They don't change how we read
the grammar of the phrases,
they don't force us to recast
our expectations.
Together, though,
as a series of enjambments,
these lines evoke a state in
which the world is freshly
taking shape,
coming at us in forms that we
have to confront,
that give us abrupt insistent
impressions,
which are sometimes full of
meaning and sometimes not.
 
The way Williams is
constructing this poem is a
poetic version of the action
that the poem's describing:
the going forward into spring
against the cold,
through which eventually,
one by one, objects are
defined;
defined and organized and
energized and animated as
Williams sees it.
As I say, the verb does not
come in the poem until we see
that phrase "spring approaches,"
almost at the middle or
slightly beyond the middle of
the poem.
And then there is that next
sentence, "they enter the new
world naked":
"they" being deliberately
vague,
evoking the things of the world
but in a humanized way,
a humanized way as we come to
feel them and see them.
 
They enter the world just as we
do, naked.
And we re-enter it naked with
them, you could say.
This is a poem about emergence
that identifies modern poetry
– modern verse,
as Williams calls it in his
letter to Monroe – identifies
modern verse with the process by
which the perceptual world takes
shape,
grips down, rooting itself in
ordinary fact and things,
and from which a kind of energy
is drawn and we begin to awaken.
This is probably a good place
to end.
I want to stress the resonance
and suggestiveness of Williams's
investment in what is naked.
 
It's a way of envisioning the
world in its primary terms.
It's also a way of calling
forth a kind of human energy
that is primary and again,
as Williams imagines it,
modern.
And here he is in the buff;
I guess, skinny dipping in New
Jersey with a couple of sticks
to pretend he's Pan.
 
So, go enjoy the spring day,
keep your clothes on,
and we'll talk about maybe a
little more Williams but
definitely Marianne Moore next
time.
