Gradesaver has published multiple guides on individual poems by William Carlos Williams, including "Between Walls," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," "Danse Russe," "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and "This Is Just to Say."
While Williams had clear interests throughout his career, he was able to gradually refine his style over time, making small changes to reflect the different material he was trying to cover. His first published collections, Poems and The Tempers, shared a number of the aesthetic concerns of his contemporaries and friends H.D. and Ezra Pound, focusing on conveying imagery through textured language. These poems show Williams's early interest in nature as well as the marked influence of the poets Walt Whitman and John Keats. These lines from "Contemporania" (a poem from The Tempers) illustrate his developing style well: "The corner of a great rain / Steamy with the country / Has fallen upon my garden." This excerpt shows Williams's interest in constructing clear imagery, but the length of each line shows him still grappling with his influences. He still remains fairly close to the model set forward by his heroes, not quite comfortable with full formal innovation. He had not yet discovered his more spare style.
As his career progressed, Williams began to move away from the other Modernists and pursue an earthier voice with closer ties to the immediate world surrounding him. The elevation of this quality in his work led to him paring his lines further and further down. This was in part a reaction against some of the elitism he perceived in his colleagues, but also the accumulation of daily struggles he observed in his patients. He came increasingly to believe in the need for poetry to be accessible, honest, and direct. His work from this middle period onward is marked distinctively by this bluntness. His most famous poems from this time are almost shocking in their sparseness. "The Red Wheelbarrow" offers a compelling glimpse at this new direction in his compositional approach: "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." It is a single sentence, unpunctuated, written entirely in lowercase. Some of the lines are a single word and each detail is chosen with pinpoint precision. The uncluttered quality of the style here makes each image starkly clear. The space afforded in each stanza allows the reader to consider these images more slowly. Additionally, the enjambment between lines keeps the momentum of the short poem moving throughout. After a careful evaluation of his process, Williams was able to develop a voice that was direct but deceptively complex, its simplicity concealing the massive amount of craft that went into each stanza.
However, much to Williams's frustration, the 1923 publication of Spring and All was overshadowed by the arrival of T.S. Eliot's massively acclaimed The Waste Land. Williams found Eliot's masterwork to be technically virtuosic but coldly cerebral and overly saturated with references to the canonical works of European literature. He thought its cloistered intellectualism made it decisively a step in the wrong direction. Along these lines, Williams commented: "I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit." His consternation with its success, in many regards, marked his final break with Pound, Eliot, H.D., and his other contemporaries in the Modernism and Imagism movements. These aesthetic qualms, and his resulting frustration about his own work, would lead Williams to take a lengthy hiatus and, once again, radically reconsider his methodology.
The result of this period of relative silence was the epic poem Paterson. Split into five books and published between 1946 and 1958, Paterson was Williams reckoning with James Joyce's Ulysses and his reaction against Eliot's Waste Land. He sought to capture the overlap that he saw between the modern person's consciousness and the ever-present bustle of a major city. He chose Paterson because of its proximity to his own life as well as his perception of it as a dynamo of civic and infrastructural progress. Through meticulous practice, he came up with a compositional method that he thought suited his subject matter. He made periodic visits to Paterson, collecting bits of conversation, historical detail, and individual stories that allowed him to develop a composite image of the city as a whole. He also crafted his own form of prosody that allowed him to be metrically innovative while remaining separate from the inherited verse structures of his forebears. His approach to form in this lengthy project was best summarized in the refrain that appeared throughout it: "no ideas but in things." He was concerned with the material of life, both in the concrete physicality of buildings, parks, and power plants, but also in the immediate circumstances of people's lives. Paterson is as much the narrative of housewives and doctors as it is about the pulse of the city itself. A pointed directness is palpable throughout the work and exemplified clearly in this passage from Book I which describes the Paterson Falls: "the river comes pouring in above the city / and crashes from the edge of the gorge / in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-" In Paterson, Williams managed to combine his Whitman-like desire to write about everyone all at once, assisted by his sharply honed eye for imagery. He had also found a way to write past both his own previous work and that of his peers, forging a voice entirely unique in American verse. While contemporary reviews were somewhat tepid, more recent critical reappraisals have recognized it as a major capstone in Williams's oeuvre.
In his later career, Williams enjoyed a greater deal of attention thanks, in no small part, to the vocal appreciation of a new generation of poets, including Allen Ginsburg, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder. Williams's late style was largely a return to form. Compared to the oddity and sprawl of Paterson, Williams's later collections were relatively restrained, making use of a voice not dissimilar to that of Spring and All. Williams's most acclaimed, and final, project of this time period was Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Bruegel's paintings were a fairly clear precursor to many of Williams's interests, albeit in another medium. Bruegel was known for depictions of small villages and towns, paying particularly close attention to the events of peasant life. Many of Williams's friends and colleagues remarked that he often looked to his favorite painters to solve the artistic problems and puzzles that he sought to solve in his writing. In Bruegel, he clearly saw a certain shared sensibility, as they were both interested in the earthy texture of an everyday existence. The poems mostly recapture the scenes that Bruegel painted, but with a certain eye for the composition of the piece as a whole: "Summer ! / the painting is organized / about a young / reaper enjoying his / noonday rest / completely." He maintains the brevity of his other work, but uses it to playfully examine the work of another artist for whom he had a great deal of admiration.
Williams prized clarity and immediacy in his work. He was a poet for whom the relationship of form and content had to be exactly calibrated. His output demonstrated the rigor with which he worked through his style over the span of his career. Poetry, in his mind, was not simply a vehicle for verbal decoration, but an expression of the raw materials of life. He tried to make his poetry embrace the most immediate aspects of daily existence; in doing so he developed a style that was grounded and direct.
