William Carlos Williams Influence In American Poetry

The world when the modern poetry was born was deeply touched by the discoveries of that time, be it Einstein’s theory, or Freud, or the development of a new art – photography. Everything come together and left its mark on modern literature, and implicit, on poetry. On this period, a great influence over the poetry of the world had the American poets. According to Cary Nelson, the modern American poetry is “unexcelled in its richness, inventiveness, and diversity”, and those characteristic are what makes modern poetry succeed. Some of the American poets (Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound) even come back to Europe and act as mentors for writers from all around the world, other remain home, in America, but their influence was none the less important: …show more content…
But, it is impossible not to notice the unicity of William Carlos Williams’ style such as the lack of punctuation, which makes the poem feel as if it were a single sentenced, as if the teller is forced to stop from time to time for a very short period of time, and by the end of the poem, there is no dot, which means that this could still go on, and maybe it does, in the mind of the reader who had already created the image in his mind. Moreover, the predilection for the season spring, which appear in many of his work ( see the volume “Spring and All” ), indicates to a desire of revival. Actually, one of Williams key terms in his theory of poetry is this – revival. He strongly believed that this is the only way in which poetry could be considered valuable, by bringing something new, “it is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security”( Williams, 24). Is not only bringing new ideas into poetry, but refreshing the old ones, and he death of Icarus is a very popular motif from Ovid’s Metamorphoses upwards. What Bruegel did was that, in his painting, the death of Icarus is unnoticed, “a splash quite unnoticed/ thus was/ Icarus drowing”, while the people, revived by the new season, worked the field. Human life moves on, praising fertility while Icarus dies unnoticed. It is acknowleage that there is a link …show more content…
In this case, the influence is reverses, it is not Williams that is inspired by a certain painting to write a poem, but Demuth that creates a painting – “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” inspired by one of Williams’ poems – “The Great Figure”. As seen before, Williams puts a lot of accent on the sight. Williams, like in “The Red Wheelbarrow” plays with what should be the main symbol of the poem. There it was a common wheelbarrow, here we have the figure 5, which is not, let’s say 3, or 9, or 7, which bares with them a wide symbolist. At the same lecture upon William Carlos Williams at Yale University, Professor Langdon Hammer states the following: “ 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”. Seems like Williams was keen on showing us that what is seen on a daily basis, the ordinary, could bare a great symbolism, and the word seen is quite important, as the poem states “ I saw the figure 5/ in Gold”. Though the two poems, “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “The Great Figure” have a lot of things in common, in the latter, the apparition of the personal pronoun “I” makes a difference. While in “ The Red Wheelbarrow”, the scene appears as if it were catch from somewhere above, in this one, the intermmediator is present, it’s the “I” which chooses to see this ordinary figure 5,