 I'm going to talk about William Carlos Williams today. It may be that I end up carrying a little bit of Williams over to next time, to Marianne Moore, his friend contemporary and really close collaborator, in the New York scene of modernism in the teens, twenties, thirties, forties, and on into the fifties. This is the man as a young man, William Carlos Williams. If you open your anthologies to page 284, and the long headnote that and useful headnote that Jehan Ramazani provides you, there's this quotation from a letter in the middle of 284 that Williams wrote to Harriet Monroe, the editor of poetry who 13 years later Hart Crane would write to in defense of his poem at Melville's Tomb. And Williams says in this letter to Monroe, most current verse is dead from the point of view of art. It's dead. It's lifeless. And what Williams cares about is something he calls life. Now, life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before. And I think that's how we know it in Williams' life is subverting whatever was a moment before. And subversive is probably an important and suggestive word there. Subversive of life as it was the moment before always new, irregular. He wants what is new, and what is new is going to be what is irregular, and what is irregular has in some sense subverted what was in place before. And he continues verse to be alive to have what pound I think would have called the impulse. For verse to be alive it must have infused into it something of the same order. It has to have life in it, or what he calls some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an unstoppable revolution. In a ethereal reversal, let me say, I am speaking of modern verse. Like certain of our other poets, Williams is self-consciously modern. He's defining what modern means, and he's defining it as a quality of experience that has life, that has the quality of disrupting whatever was in existence before. And this is a quality and energy that he wants to have in his poetry itself. This is Williams a little bit older, Williams in 1924. When he has established himself through the poems in a volume called Spring and All as one of the major modern poets in America, he is the author of a poem, have you ever seen it, called The Red Wheelbarrow? And that might be a good place to begin. That's on 294-295. Of course, I'm joking. Probably that's the one poem everybody in this class has read before they came to this class. It is better known than the Negro Speaks of Rivers or Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve, even. It is also distinguished, I think, as being the second shortest modern poem after In a Station of the Metro, a poem that it's related to in certain ways. In fact, a link between Williams and Pound is important. It's relevant. Pound was a friend and rival for Williams throughout his career. Williams is sometimes seen in his early stages as a kind of imagist, or at any rate as a poet influenced by the imagist aesthetic. Imagism is, of course, a visual metaphor, and Williams is, above all, a visual poet, a poet of the eye. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with the white chicken and beside the white chickens. Well, I think you have to see that poem to start to really be able to read it. I think it probably does involve some subtle vocal and auditory experience, but it's first of all a poem that meets you and challenges you through the eye as a visual object in some sense on the page. The kind of seeing that Williams' poems call for is we can think of as a way of reading that his poems themselves demand. In other words, there's a kind of link between how he sees the world and the success to read him. His poems model a kind of seeing. Unlike In A Station of the Metro, the red wheelbarrow, or let me call it instead so much depends, is a poem without a title. This title, the red wheelbarrow, was like the title this is just to say in the poem that is an equally famous poem. These are titles Williams added later to his work. In Spring and All, that volume, the first edition 1923, the poem appears simply as a text on the page. That's important. It's as important as the title is for In A Station of the Metro. Simply presenting the poem on the page to us as Williams does, doing without a title, Williams asks us to in some sense read and encounter this poem without a frame, without some kind of pre-established boundary or explanatory introduction or entry. That choice increases the immediacy of our experience. It's as if Williams were asking you to kind of press up close to the poem, face it, just as he is facing the thing he is writing about, or asks us to face, well, not the thing that he's writing about so much as his act of writing and seeing, his act of writing as it is of seeing. The poem has a suggestion that it requires as a poem the same kind of calm intensity of concentration that the poet's observation of the wheelbarrow exemplifies. Again, I think the kind of way that the poem does models a way of reading. Well, what is that way of reading? How does the poem embody in its construction, which it calls attention to, how does it embody in its construction a mode of perception, a way of seeing? Williams organized this language on the page by what principles? Looking at it, well, as I suggested before, it's not a poem I think that we begin by hearing, and we have to start reading it and seeing it before we can even think about how to really understand it. It is not a metrical poem. This is not Iambic pentameter. It is a free verse poem. In the prologue to Quora in Hell, which is the prose I asked you to read for today at the back of the book, there's a number of sentences and ideas that are important. I'll call attention to just a few. On 958, Williams says, Nothing is good, save the new. If a thing have novelty, it stands intrinsically beside every other work of artistic excellence, and if it doesn't, no loveliness or heroic proportion or grand manner will save it. He identifies here as elsewhere this property of novelty with a kind of verse that eschews Rhyman-Meter, a whole host of existing poetic conventions. Again, in the headnote to the Williams selection, there's a quotation from Williams on the subject of Meter on 285 from his prose statement, The Poem as a Field of Action. He says, I propose sweeping changes from top to bottom of the poetic structure. I say we are through with the Iambic pentameter as presently conceived, through with the measured quatrain, the staid concatenation of sounds and the usual stanza, the sonnet. So much for the silicon tent, heart crane, Wallace Stevens, et cetera. Williams is insisting that modern verse, the kind of verse he describes has to be, has to break with these models and has to proceed by a kind of, by patterns that it itself invents. Free verse is, in that sense, the Williams's chosen medium. Free verse, meaning a poem not patterned by metrical scheme or rhyme, or indeed some other, in a sense, pre-existing principle or pattern. Nonetheless, free verse does always have some kind of operative pattern, sometimes very strict and structuring ones, and this short poem is a good example. In fact, as you examine it, you see a series of four stanzas, four two-line groups, since Williams might not like the word stanza, four two-line groups, and the pattern is long, short, three or four syllables followed by two. And this is itself almost like a metrical or a rhyme scheme. In fact, you could say this poem is more strict than a sonnet, that it's more limited in the range of choices that it allows. It isn't, however, presented to us as sonnets of a received verse form that is, at least in its general pattern, invariant and, again, pre-existing. Instead, the poem presents itself as a kind of ad hoc arrangement, as a kind of structure that the poet has chosen to work within, reflecting the contingencies of this moment, the occasion, the poem's purpose. The poem's shape, and this is one reason it's hard to speak, it's hard to hear, organizes Williams's speech in a manner that disregards or disrupts normal, familiar syntax. It does so specifically through enjambment by carrying one line over to the next. Williams's enjambments have here, as throughout his poetry, the effect of breaking up language, breaking it up, forcing us to, in fact, slow down our reading, to stop taking languages sense-making for granted, and, in a sense, to get into the poem. The white space in a Williams poem is, you can think of it as a space for thought, a space where we are invited, required to think about choices, to ask ourselves about what possible connections can be made at a given moment. In this poem, Williams specifically breaks words up into their component parts, wheel, barrow, rain, water, without hyphens. As if what he was looking at, a red wheelbarrow, consisted of those three terms, redness, the wheel, the barrow. These are its component elements. He points out, in effect, in this device how, in this case, two nouns that are made of compounds, that are really compounds, represent things that are compounds, things that are made up of other things that have parts. As he establishes this pattern, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain, water, you want to carry it forward, don't you, now that we've learned what he's doing, into the next stanza, as if white chickens were the same kind of compound as rain water and red wheelbarrow. But they're not quite, and Williams is in a way teasing us. White chickens aren't made up of whiteness and chickenness in the same way that a wheelbarrow is made up of a wheel and a barrow. He's doing something a little different here. No sooner has he, in effect, established a certain pattern of cognition. It showed us how to read his engemments, then he breaks that pattern. He revises how it works. It's just been put in place, and now it's changed. In fact, it's over. It's done. The poem is done. If the first lines of the poem and the first stanzas are, in a sense, made to interrupt and disrupt and thereby freshen our habits of seeing, to make us see these things in some new way, this last stanza does away with the habit of seeing that the poem itself has just constructed, just introduced us to. Williams prevents us from settling into a convention of perception, even in a poem that is as small and as brief as this one. There's really only enough time in the poems, essentially, introduction and three parts following to establish a pattern and break it. What this brief moment of heightened perception allows us to see, to experience, is something small and large. What is it that depends on the red wheelbarrow? Williams only says so much, so much. The idea is, I think, the beautiful one that the world, when it's glazed with rainwater, a kind of aesthetic effect, an aesthetic effect that implies a light that does the glazing that's somewhere behind our shoulders and the poets, as he looks at these objects, that that light, which comes after rain and is a product of change, of the energy of the world as it transforms, this light suddenly allows this world to be seen in visible detail, apprehensible in its component parts, and the ordinary gestalt of perception is interrupted, freshened and reoriented. We see something ordinary, newly and freshly, it stands out, and what we see in miniature, in the limited space of the moment, or of the poem, is a world, well, what we see is the elements out of which the world is made, is ordinarily held in a kind of complex mutual dependency, a kind of complex of relations that we simply take for granted, in the words that we use, in the way that we see things, just as we put together wheel and barrow and rain and water without thinking about it. What the red wheelbarrow holds in that sense depends on it is something pretty heavy, and that is the sense of a whole world or better, the sense of the world in its wholeness, which is something affirmed in this attractively modest, momentary, poetic perception, so much for the red wheelbarrow. Spring and All, and there's that idea again in the title, Spring as a season of newness for Williams beginning his career, Spring registering his own beginnings, registering modernness, a vision of the world in its newness. Well, Spring and All is a beautiful book, and one I wish I could show you, but the last time I saw it at Beinecke it disappeared, and no one has seen it in a couple of years. They have a lot of paper over there. I guess it's easy to lose things. Maybe it's available. We'll look and see. It's a beautiful, plain book, Robin's Egg Blue for Spring, I suppose. It seems it's not large, it's small. It almost has no ornament. In all this it seems to exemplify the American virtues of plainness and directness and simplicity. Again, a long way from Heart Crane. And the book is really so American that it was published in Dijon. Williams is a polemically American poet, even more than Crane in certain ways, more than Frost even. Williams has a very important and vital relationship to European modernism and to French modernism in particular, and even more particularly to French painting. To understand how Williams is writing what he's trying to get at, it's helpful to remember what he was looking at. Here's a Brock, George Brock, 1908. It's on the way to Cubism. I think it's sort of helpfully on the way to Cubism because it looks back to a realist tradition with its, in a sense, conventional perspectival space that's yet being broken up into planes that allow us to register the painting as a painting that forces us to, really. And I suppose even more striking is this one of many great late Cezanne paintings of Le Mansin Victoire, where here, again, the perspectival space of the painting is being turned into almost a kind of abstract field of color patterns. Again, these are painters interested in foregrounding their action of seeing through the ways in which they foreground self-consciously the materiality of the medium in which they are working. The aim in post-impressionist painting, and then in Cubism really is to, again, break up that gestalt of perception that Williams is also opposing himself to, to break it up and grasp, in some sense, the dynamism in the world before us, precisely through acts of seeing that call attention to themselves and to the way in which that seeing is rendered. If you have read the Prologue to Quora in Hell, which starts on 958, you know that, excuse me, 954, Williams begins with an anecdote about Marcel Duchamp, part of the New York art world that Williams also participated in through his friend, the dealer and taste maker, Walter Aronsburg. Once when I was taking lunch with Walter Aronsburg, I asked him if he could state what the more modern painters were about, and then he gives several as examples, including Duchamp, all of whom were then in New York. Aronsburg replied by saying that the only way man differed from every other creature was in his ability to improvise and, since the pictorial artist was under discussion, anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation is good art. Thus, according to Duchamp, who was Aronsburg's champion at the time, a stained glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was a far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ, which was an interesting model for what Williams himself might be seen as doing in poetry, that in some sense he's taking the stained glass window and seeing it laid out on the floor, maybe broken on the floor. Duchamp painted this famous picture nude descending a staircase, and it is clearly all about here rendering, in pictorial form, the kind of multi-frame vision that photography motion pictures allow us to see, to again here grasp in representation some sense of the movement and energy that compose the world that we see before us. The other dimension of the Duchamp anecdote that's nice in Williams' telling is that, well, a stained glass window that has fallen out is more or find, and Duchamp is, of course, most famous for his, let me turn to the next image, his ready-mades. This affects similarly, or that is another version of, his most famous ready-made fountain, a urinal, which he signed with the pseudonym R. Moot, 1917, and presented as a work of art. The art gallery has this work. This, too, is, as it were, a facsimile of the original, now lost, a snow shovel. Another ready-made, this one with the excellent title, In Advance of the Broken Arm. Duchamp takes post-impressionism to New York in the form of Dada, a movement with its importance for Williams, too, including, I think, Duchamp's mischievousness and his willingness to provoke, be subversive, to take Williams' word and to play with expectations about what constitutes art, as Williams, in certain ways, would play with our expectations about what could constitute a poem or poetic statement. In New York and elsewhere, Williams is in contact with a whole range of modernist American artists influenced by the European art I've just been talking about, but also working in distinctively American mode. This is a work by Charles de Muth, 1921. I'm sorry I'm behind on producing my image lists, but I have some ideas for you. Here's another, and again, here, an urban scene that is realist in its mode of representation, and yet the foregrounding of the lines created by the different shapes of the buildings, call attention to this as indeed a kind of constructed image that seems to be moving out of the realm of realist representation to something more symbolic and certainly avowedly created by the artist. De Muth goes further in the same direction in what is probably his best known work. This is called the Great Figure Number Five. If Williams was busy looking at these artists I've just been talking about, they also were looking at him. De Muth's painting is a tribute to Williams and a little homage, also I think a little joke about. Williams' own poem, also from Spring and All, that we know as the Great Figure on 291. This is, well I'll read this, again rain and light. Among the rain and lights I saw the figure five in gold on a red fire truck moving with weight and urgency, tense, unheated, to gong clang siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city. And this is De Muth's rendering of that moment that draws out the way in which the poem finds and makes an exalted symbol from this ordinary perception. It's got Bill up top and W.C.W. down in the bottom and Carlos underneath the five as part of this friendly tribute. The poem's interesting to look at next to the red wheelbarrow. Here's something else that's red, right? And again the poem is concerned with a moment of perception. Here the poem really tries to render the process by which perception takes place, or rather the kind of context in which it does, or the red wheelbarrow doesn't. The red wheelbarrow really kind of takes something seen, almost fragmented out of a continuum of perception that we can feel implied but isn't made explicit in the poem. In this case we're given the kind of context out of which a detail, something that arbitrary, contingent, ordinary springs out of the rush of things and catches the eye and the imagination and the intention of the poet. In a station of the Metro, this is a poem about metropolitan urban perception, so is this poem. Here, instead of a present moment that's briefly suspended, as in Pound's poem or as in So Much Depends, this poem is just as much about memory in the rush of ongoing experience of a kind of ongoing temporality of figured here by the firetruck moving. There's that participial word moving kind of ongoing action. In the midst of this something catches the poet's attention. He acts as a perceiver. He says, I saw, in that action, expressed in a verb in the past tense, intervenes in and cuts into this blurry perceptual participial flow of things that is the firetruck rushing by. It fixes on a figure, in this case a number, and carries that away and out of the experience. That five on the firetruck, it's something utterly ordinary like a wheelbarrow or a shovel, a snow shovel. It's a kind of found object. And yet here for Williams, he makes something of it or plays with the act of making something with it. It is something he calls, with some joking, some seriousness, the great figure, a great figure, a symbol, but a symbol of what? Of what exactly? Well, 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, what do you think? That seems possible too. The five senses whose powers are behind for Williams the way we create figurative language, the way we create figures and poems and discover symbols and discover meaning in the world around us. Now life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before, always new, irregular. The poem that plays just after this anthology is one of Williams's greatest and it too, as it appears in the volume Spring and All, has no title but is given a title here, the title of the volume itself, but was known rather for a long time simply by its first line, by the road to the contagious hospital. The poem is about the continual newness that Williams calls life, something that's continually constructing the world around us, and the poet in this poem gets at it, like the post-impressionist painter, even perhaps like the dataist, by calling his and our attention to the act of constructing his poem, and in particularly as that construction is felt as it's kind of brought to our consciousness through enjambment. Williams's poetry, like the world he sees, is constantly enjammed, segmented, renewed by that act. Let's look at how enjambment works here. By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue-modeled clouds driven from the northeast, a cold wind, beyond the waste of broad, muddy fields, brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen, patches of standing water, the scattering of tall trees, all along the road the reddish-purplish-forked, upstanding twiggy stuff of trees, and small trees with dead brown leaves under them leafless vines, lifeless, again dead, in appearance, sluggish, dazed spring approaches. That is the first verb in the poem. They, he now says, suggesting all of these things, they enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter, all about them, these things, the things of the world, the cold, familiar wind, now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf, one by one objects are defined, like a series of poems, it, now not they but it, which is, again, now here, a world felt in its wholeness, quickens, clarity, outline of leaf, but now the stark dignity of entrance, still the profound change has come upon them, rooted they grip down and begin to awaken. And enjambment is a key part of its energy. The first enjambment that is striking is bold, it's one of the really famous ones, in fact, in modern poetry, is that second line, under the surge of the blue. It invites us to read the blue as a noun, right, and to feel and hear that phrase, the surge of the blue, as a kind of conventional expression of lyric romantic exaltation, but we're wrong. Blue is an adjective and we learn this as the poem turns and the enjambment supplies the information that this blue, kind of exalted thing is actually mottled, marred or flawed even in some sense. And here the newness that the poem is going to celebrate is going to be something we might feel modeled that is called flawed, which is part of its history to be new, part of its claim to represent something really real, not to be found in previous books of poetry, but something to be found in living. So, at this moment it seems enjambment means disestablishment, that word of things is the subversion of life as it just was, a surprise of perception. But, as in the red wheelbarrow, if you think we've now learned what enjambment means in a given context, Williams is going to do something else. The next lines are also sharply enjammed, mottled clouds driven from the northeast, a cold wind beyond the waist of broad muddy fields. That is itself a bold thing to have done in poetry to break off a line at the definite article. I'm not sure that there's an example in poetry previously to align to these examples of lines ending in the. There may well be, but it's yet a novel and bold thing for Williams to do. But it works differently from the previous example where the blue invited us to read that phrase as a kind of noun expressive of romantic exaltation and then gave us the surprise that, no, it doesn't function that way and what you thought was pure and exalted is in fact mottled and messy. These enjambments don't have any kind of interpretive surprise like that. The lines are just broken that way. They don't change how we read the grammar of the phrases. They don't force us to recast our expectations. Together though, as a series of enjambments, these lines evoke a state in which the world is freshly taking shape, coming at us in forms that we have to confront that give us abrupt, insistent impressions, which are sometimes full of meaning and sometimes not. This is a poetic version, the way Williams is constructing this poem is a poetic version of the action that the poem is describing, the going forward into spring against the cold through which eventually one by one objects are defined, defined and organized and energized and animated as Williams sees it. As I say, the verb does not come in the form until we see that phrase spring approaches almost at the middle, slightly beyond the middle of the poem, and then that next sentence, they enter the new world naked, they being deliberately vague, evoking the things of the world, but in a humanized way, as we come to feel them and see them, they enter the world just as we do, naked, and we re-enter it naked with them, you could say. This is a poem about emergence that identifies modern poetry, modern verse, as Williams calls it in his letter to Monroe, identifies modern verse with the process by which the perceptual world takes shape, grips down, grips down, rooting itself in ordinary fact and things, and from which a kind of energy is drawn and we begin to awaken. This is probably a good place to end. I want to stress the importance and suggestiveness of Williams' investment in what is naked. It's a way of envisioning the world in its primary terms. It's also a way of calling forth a kind of human energy that is primary and, again, as Williams imagines it, modern. And here he is in the buff, I guess, skinny-dipping in New Jersey with a couple sticks to pretend he's pan. So, go enjoy the spring day and we'll keep your clothes on and we'll talk about maybe a little more Williams, but definitely marry in more ways.