[MacArthur]

Masters and Williams II

The Ogre

Sweet child,
little girl with well-shaped legs
you cannot touch the thoughts
I put over and under and around you.
This is fortunate for they would
burn you to an ash otherwise.
Your petals would be quite curled up.

This is all beyond you–no doubt,
yet you do feel the brushings
of the fine needles;
the tentative lines of your whole body
prove it to me;
so does your fear of me,
your shyness;
likewise the toy baby cart
that you are pushing–
and besides, mother has begun
to dress your hair in a knot.
These are my excuses.

The Lonely Street

School is over. It is too hot
to walk at ease. At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall. They hold
pink flames in their right hands.
In white from head to foot,
with sidelong, idle look–
in yellow, floating stuff,
black sash and stockings–
touching their avid mouths
with pink sugar on a stick–
like a carnation each holds in her hand–
they mount the lonely street.

William Carlos Williams

Williams is most famous for a couple of minimalist stunts (Red Whellbarrow, etc.) but the above is where he’s at his best…and where he’s been more influential. At a glance, any well-read American can recognize the style that has dominated American poetry in the second half of the XXth Century. Yet both poems were written in the 1920’s when other approaches were current fashion…he was way ahead!

It’s not that much different from Masters. Same Realist aesthetic. Same plein-air language. Same detailed observation and carefully identified imagery. Same commitment to “sense”.

Sometimes Formalists criticise all this sort of thing as “chopped-up prose”, “prose with line-breaks”. Poetry— as far as it doesn’t radically depart from normal syntax— is always prose, with line-breaks. You may or may not add a sauce of alliteration, rhyme or metrical patterning (you could do that to prose composed in paragraphs…it’s been done), but it’s the line-breaks that make it verse.

The main difference is where Williams breaks his lines. Williams’ style is far more sprinkled with enjambments, whereas Masters is fully end-stopped. And that’s come to be more true as the century wore on.

The “natural history” of a poet in North America is apt to be thus: You discover a mature interest in poetry in, say, Junior High. You will be prone to compose your lines as Masters would have. If you have the knack for phrasing and a facility for imagery, you’ll get some approval— and you’ll gradually be admonished to “enjamb more”…some times with happy results, and more often not, but the pressure won’t abate. By the time you graduate MFA you will more or less have the knack of it (picked up from models like Williams). You will have acquired a whole pseudo-science about “technique”-- but it’s really a pretty casual matter. If your poetry receives recognition for some other sort of excellence, you will gradually end-stop your lines more...and get away with it.

It’s at least marginally more difficult to read poetry that’s fairly enjambed, and even the well-trained American literary audience has been drawn into this game— we mistrust poetry as end-stopped as Masters. It’s too easy, and we know poetry is supposed to be hard.

William’s style of poetry is a legit approach. But two things can reasonably be said about it: it doesn’t suit everyone with a genius for poetry, and it’s been done...and done... and done...




[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited February 27, 2002).]

[Robert Swagman]

Thanks for a well written commentary.

[JohnBoddie]

Thanks for putting this up.

Pinsky covers a lot of the same ground in his "The Situation of Poetry" but comes at it from a slightly different angle.

I'd suggest that it is, in many ways, easier to discern relative quality in a set of metric poems than it is for a similarly-sized set of FV. This might seem odd, as constructing a worthy sonnet is a difficult task for most of us, more so than creating the skeleton of a good FV poem. The truth of the matter is that a lot of manure has been brought into poetry, carried in WCW's Red Wheelbarrow, and the ease of creating mediocre FV (aka bad prose with linebreaks) has encouraged many to try their hand at the game.

Good Free Verse exhibits the same sensibilities for sound, rhythm and image that metrical poetry does, and has a braoder canvas on which to paint. The use of internal rhymes, the creation of little fugues with rhythms playing off against each other in support of different ascpects of the narrative in the poem, the management of line length and white space - all of these need to come together to produce FV that makes us say "Aaaah!".

Perhaps the proper analogy is to consider Metrical verse as chess and FV as Go.

JB

[MacArthur]

JB, I don't think of the minimalist stunts like Red Wheel-barrow or "This Is Just To Say" as William's most characteristic approach...WCW, of course, wrote in a lot of styles, including some metrical verse. The above are samples of the style which has become most influential, Post WWII.
It's not bad-- there's some meat on the bone. But it has become a sophisticated mannerism. It's the sort of thing that's normative at Gazebo.

I wrote these articles a time ago...mostly for my own amusement. It's a sleepy board, so it seemed harmless to post them...even if you and a coupl'a people are the only ones who read them. I hope they don't sound too smug. Think of them as partly tounge-in-cheek, partly notes by a working poet (as much theory as I need).

I'll post one about minimalism.

[graywyvern]

i am enjoying these discussions. one thing i
have noticed is poets--even intelligent, well-read
poets--who somehow picked up the trick of enjambing
(in order to make their lines appear more sophisticated,
as you suggest) but when they read their poems out
loud, they follow the sense, not the line endings on
the page. there is one particular poet here in this
town, who not only heads a local poetry society, but
has gone so far as to presume to teach poetic technique
to neophytes--& i have tried to talk with him over
a ten year period, without success, to make him either
pause at the end of the lines he wrote, or else write
the poem down the way he reads it... it's hopeless.

this is how one verse technique in Latin got lost--
& it was never rediscovered, till finally a completely
different one arose to take its place. and you know
what? in the meantime (a period of several hundred
years, BTW), people wrote lines that looked about
the same length on the page.