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

William Carlos Williams: Free the Poetry!      Ã‚  Ã‚   Williams does away with traditional poetic structure in order to free the actual poetry inherent in the sounds and meanings of words. In his poetry, he offers a lesson in aesthetics regarding how to engage his poetry as a way of looking at reality. At the literal level, his poetry speaks self-reflexively about its significance: "It is hard to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." His poetry attempts to re-engage people in reality. As he contends: "Anything is good material 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 Pacific and 2 live-frozen trout from Denmark.    He turns a fashionable grocery list into poetry by arranging the words upon the page in a manner allowing for poetic rhythm to emerge (Weatherhead 108). Rather than creating poetry according to the conventional 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 one's mind: "depends" is broken away from "upon," "wheel" is separated from "barrow," "rain" divided from "water," and "white" is disjoined from "chickens." By altering 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 literal line about men dying miserably every day for lack of what is found in poetry does) to remind us of poetry's value in connecting us with reality. His shifting poetic structure forces the reader to engage his images freshly.    Williams further instructs the reader in how to view his poems in one entitled "To a Solitary Discipline":    Rather notice, mon cher, that the moon is tilted above the point of the steeple than that its color is shell-pink.    Rather observe