William Carlos Williams: Poems Essay Questions

How did Williams use enjambment in his poetry?

As Williams's style developed, he began to rely increasingly on enjambment. In some cases this meant dividing a single sentence into very brief segments; in some cases it meant writing lines that were a single word. This technique is prominently on display in "Between Walls," as the entire poem ("the back wings / of the / hospital where / nothing / will grow lie / cinders / in which shine / the broken / pieces of a green / bottle") is one relatively short description spliced into eight lines. The overall effect of this choice is the careful selection of details that requires the reader to process each individual image slowly. At the same time, the break-up of each line keeps the momentum of the poem moving along from stanza to stanza. This effect is also visible in the middle section of "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" when the speaker notes: "a farmer was ploughing / his field / the whole pageantry / of the year was / awake tingling / near." In both cases, the reader is compelled to keep following the arc of the scene while still being asked to take in each detail with care.

How would one best characterize Williams's style?

Williams prized clarity and directness in his style. As he crafted his voice, he sought to find a form that could convey imagery and emotion without interference. He also attempted to capture the daily struggles of average people, largely influenced by his career experiences as a doctor. His style could best be described as concise and straightforward, as exemplified in the texture of one of his most well-known poems, "This Is Just To Say," which uses definitively commonplace language: "I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox." The speaker is writing in a tone that imitates the off-the-cuff quality of a note left on the kitchen counter. In this example, and many others, Williams not only tried to show a scene from normal domestic life, but also incorporated the plain language surrounding it.

What did Williams view his work as a reaction against?

Initially, Williams saw his poetry as a reaction against the excesses he perceived in Romantic and Victorian poetry. Alongside poets like H.D. and Ezra Pound, he tried to write in a way that very clearly conveyed his imagery and ideas to the reader. However, as time went on, he turned away from some of the other figures associated with the Imagism and Modernism movements. For Williams, works like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, while technically impressive, made themselves inaccessible with their hermetic references to the Western literary canon. In Paterson and his other late works, he sought to hone a style that was uniquely American and distinctively his own. He wanted his work to be visceral and immediate, accessible to anyone, and dealing with the battles of the everyday. Ultimately, Williams wanted his work to turn away from the exclusive intellectualism and linguistic indulgence he saw in the work of some of his peers.

How does Williams construct imagery in his poems?

Williams builds the imagery in his poems through the precise placement of specific details. This technique is prominently utilized throughout his work. In "The Red Wheelbarrow," the speaker states that the wheelbarrow is "glazed with rain / water," offering a clear image of the static wheelbarrow being covered in a light sheet of collected rainwater. In "This Is Just To Say," the speaker notes that the plums he regrets eating "were delicious / so sweet / and so cold." With these short lines, he creates a powerful impression of the lingering taste of these plums. Finally, in "Between Walls," the speaker describes the way some shards of glass "shine" in the forgotten back area of a hospital. In all of these examples, Williams picks one very particular example to create an immediate picture in the reader's mind. These details elucidate the scene and bring a painterly vividness to the poem as a whole.

What did Williams develop in the time between Spring and All and Paterson?

In the aftermath of the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Williams suffered a kind of artistic crisis. Williams felt frustrated with the pretentiousness Williams felt Eliot's poem espoused and disappointed by the extent to which it had overshadowed his own writing. In a period of hiatus, Williams began to sketch a new long-form project about the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and sought a new style to compose it. He carefully worked out a style of prosody that allowed him to manipulate meter in the same manner as Pound and Eliot, but not be indebted to their same European traditions. He also made multiple trips to the city of Paterson and journalistically collected fragments of conversation, history, and local stories. The resulting work was a pastiche of formal experimentation and grounded socio-historical reportage. During this period, Williams developed an innovative style that broke away from the other Modernists and embraced the commonplace.