William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow And The Rose Essay, Research Paper

Throughout my years in high school I was interested in poetry. I liked reading it and even wrote sometimes just for pleasure and fun. When I was in 11th grade my English teacher told me: ” the poet is the person possessing the word of the creative imagination”. He also taught me that the most basic and essential function of poetry is to evoke a particular response in the reader. He simply meant that each poet expresses in his/her own way and also brings out their own language that opens the revelation of what is going on secretly everywhere. After reading the two works by W. Carlos Williams I actually realized what my English teacher meant by it.

I have found Williams’s poetry very changing to understand and analyze. Williams seems to convey his emotion and inspiration through his short little lines of masterpieces. As any other poet Williams uses his imagination that allows him to use such simple things as he applies in the red wheelbarrow.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

In “The Red Wheelbarrow”, Williams presents a single image: the setting I think is probably a farm. The Red Wheelbarrow is a stark; it is a bright color, distinct, man-made. The chickens are white, vague, weak and auxiliary. To me this poem suggests a sense of rebirth, or new life. In this poem the reader also picks up the four small, distinct stanzas, with four words each. Each stanza has three words on the first line and one on the second. There is not doubt that the form of this poem heightens the sense of this tone, but the actual effect defies definition. The fine-tuning of the visual and auditory rhythm in the poem parallels the enhancement of its imagery. In other words, the rhythm in Williams’s poetry depends on its visual appearance.

Williams also deliberately made this poem to be flat, by the introduction of the ordinary objects and impersonal matter. The impersonal assertion: “so much depends ” is presented. Williams starts out this poem with a close focus upon the object with short jagged lines and long vowels that slows down the movement through the poem, and breaking each part of the scene for exact observation for any symbolic reading of a scene.

In this poem Williams is concerned with the basic creation of an image. I see that this poetry is a sort of plainness that contains only the essentials, a very concrete image that will convey a tone. Williams uses simple images of simple things, and a natural rhythm that seems to directly reflect his own thought of processes.

Another poem that I want to talk about is Williams’ most famous cubist poem from Spring and All is “The Rose.” Here I think he stresses above all “the artist’s responsibility to engender a second, man made order that may rival nature’s own. The work is full of playful conflations of the real and artificial. Especially as they are revealed by the word ‘edge’.” Edge to me is seen as: the physical edge of the rose’s petals the edge of the poetic line as it ends on the page the boundary between an actual physical rose and the roses constructed by the artist in a painting the interface between traditional and new uses of the rose in art. The broken syntax in the following lines I think describes these artificial worlds as “artificial roses placed at the edge of Nature’s rose, adjacent to it physically and equal to it in importance:

From the petal’s edge a line starts

that being of steel

infinitely fine, infinitely

rigid penetrates

the Milky Way

without contact – lifting

from it – neither hanging

nor pushing -

The fragility of the flower

unbruised

penetrates space.

While comparing these two excellent poems I found that in “the red wheelbarrow” the metaphor seems to be absent, where as in the “The rose is absolete” it is seen. Furthermore, after reading and reading the W. Carlos Williams works I picked up that he likes to express himself in poems through short broken lines and carry through a rhythm with continuous movement.