William Carlos Williams: Free the Poetry! :: Biography Biographies Essays

William Carlos Williams Free the Poetry Williams does away with traditional poetic mental synthesis in order to free the actual verse inherent in the sounds and meanings of words. In his poetry, he offers a lesson in aesthetics regarding how to shut away his poetry as a way of looking at reality. At the veridical level, his poetry speaks self-reflexively about its significance It is hard to get the wises from poems, unless men die miserably every sidereal day for lack of what is bring there. His poetry attempts to re-engage people in reality. As he contends Anything is good solid for poetry. Anything(Paterson V). This belief is evidenced in a passage from Two pendants for the Ears 2 partridges 2 Mallard ducks a Dungeness crab 24 hours out of the peaceful and 2 live-frozen trout from Denmark. He turns a fashionable grocery list into poetry by arranging the words upon the page in a mood allowing for poetic rhythm to emerge (Weatherhead 108). Rather than creatin g poetry according to the constituted choosing of images and creating analogies between them, his primary focus is the arrangement of words to create rhythm. In The Red Wheelbarrow, Williams takes familiar images but rearranges them in a way that differently emphasizes their meanings through rhythm. He does this by breaking apart certain phrases which conventionally flow together in ones mind depends is broken away from upon, revolve is separated from barrow, rain divided from water, and white is disjoined from chickens. By mending the rhythm through divergent arrangement of words upon the page, Williams creates a new context through which to view and absorb familiar images (Koch 50). This re-birth of the ability to newly engage old images structurally serves the significant poetic function (that the existent line about men dying miserably every day for lack of what is found in poetry does) to remind us of poetrys respect in connecting us with reality. His shifting poetic s tructure forces the reader to engage his images freshly. Williams further instructs the reader in how to view his poems in one entitle To a Solitary Discipline Rather notice, mon cher, that the moon is tilted preceding(prenominal) the point of the steeple than that its color is shell-pink. Rather observe