Still creaky, but this is more than a hundred years ago:

***

The Folly of Preoccupation

There enters no thing scatheless from the womb;
But imperfection clings all forms about.
Nor leaf, nor flower, nor pod, nor seeding plume,
But some regard shall find, than this, less stout;

And beasts there be with cloven nostrils born,
And birds that tear their young, and eyeless things;
But man more curst, more twisted, ruthless torn,
For each of these a shriveled thousand brings.

Yet to man's eyes, He who, all these can see,
Constrained to throb in just apportioned space,
Should all-pervading all perfection be.

What else than this can wisdom then out-face?
That all these shows like strains of song shall flee
Which man to try out solely here hold place.

Williams, William Carlos. The Early Poems of William Carlos Williams [Annotated] (Kindle Locations 548-559). Perscribo Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Pound told WCW he was 20 years out of date--more like 100. Even with readers who understand Latin, this is still horribly mangled syntax.

Apparently Williams never read Robinson, who had worked out how to write "conversational" sonnets all on his own.

Reuben Bright

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter-house.

You'll get no argument from me when it comes to Robinson. I like that sonnet, but Richard Cory is a better poem, I think.

It looks like this thread might be ready for that bullet, too. My OP was to show that WCW made a good choice in switching from metrical and rhyming poetry to writing in free verse. It looks to me that we're all in agreement about that.

I couldn't find any of his formal poems that I'd put alongside the ones that made it into the anthologies, except maybe Portrait of a Lady, which Hayden Carruth selected for his seminal, The Voice That is Great Within Us, in 1969. If y'all don't have that book, buy it.

Thanks all, for your thoughts.

Unless anybody's got anything else...

This William has...left...the building...


:D

PS: Dammit, Sam, you got the 42nd post!

Hi William,

I must have heard the ghost of my name echoing through the ether, because here I am to put in my tuppence on the wheelbarrow poem.

First off, sorry to say, the specific premise of this thread is a false one: "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a formal poem, not a free verse poem. It is a word count poem written in four stanzas: 3/1, 3/1, 3/1, 3/1.

Louis Turco notes as much in his book of forms, though I haven't seen it noted much elsewhere.

Having said that, most of the poems he wrote after his Keatsian apprentice phase were free verse. An exception, though loosely formal, is his "The Dance,"

The Dance

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

One could argue for amphibrachs or a loose anapestic meter in this one, though the beats per line are irregularly 3 or 4, depending.

The great mainstream of free verse poetry, including the Confessionals, the Beats, the New York School and the Black Mountain poets simply would not have existed without the later Williams of the triadic line, great flow of syntax and breath, lovely enveloping sentences, and personal and confessional statement married to larger political, mythic and social themes. That's a big statement, and feel free to take exception to it. One could argue, for example, that the WCW of the triadic line could never have existed without the triadic-lined Mayakovsky of "The Brooklyn Bridge" and other poems, or without the way Saintsbury I think it was broke down Whitman's meter into three strophes per line in a book WCW was very familiar with.

Influence aside, I think it is a bad place to start to think of WCW as the poet of Imagism, which was just his very early apprentice work, and which is widely known for the reason so much literature of Modernism is known: It was published long enough ago to be out of copyright and so is easily included for free in anthologies. If you want to include the really good later WCW poems you have to pay New Directions for them. Thus literary reputations are in thrall to capitalism.

But to come back to the wheelbarrow poem: I have an article in the latest issue of Measure that gives my take on how to read the poem with pleasure and understand the complexity of what it is doing. I won't paste in those arguments here, since I think we should support the magazine by buying it, but if I could radically summarize the argument, I see the poem as

1) acting as a fragmentation of the image into tiny shards of perception
2) moving the mind through the image and the image through the mind, thus setting them both into motion
3) working in this way to function as a Cubist poem that fragments perception and sets those fragments into simultaneous action that is completed by the mind of the viewer
4) working like so many of his poems as a meditation on poetry
5) this works particularly here because of his frequent comparison of the poem to a machine
6) the wheelbarrow is a machine made out of a wheel to move, a barrow to carry, and a lever to lift and push
7) the poem is a machine made out of syntax and form to move, content to be carried, and the mind to lift and push the form and content into action
8) for WCW true content IS form, while actual content is unimportant, since he was a thoroughgoing modernist seeking only to extend the possibilities of form (he really is a formalist, just one who rejects traditional form and seeks to create new ones)
9) therefore, the self-reflexive quality of the poem (it seeks to make the reader aware of the act of reading by denormalizing perception of the content and forcing the mind to be aware of the structure of the radical word-count line structure) attempts like much modern art to make us focus on the poem as words and spaces on the page, as a painting is paint and gesso on a canvas, and no longer see a painting as a window onto the world and the poem as a doorway to content.
10) In this sense, the poem is an objectivist poem, not an imagist poem--a poem focusing on form more than content (i.e. images), a poem focusing on images set into motion, not images frozen as if in a photograph.
11) WCW sought to make language not demonstrative but performative, which is to say, he wanted his language not to simply depict the world but to act on the world. Thus when I say, "I'm sorry for eating the plums that you were saving for breakfast," or "Come in out of the rain, you troglodyte," I am performing a social action, versus when I say, "the phone is on the desk," which does no psychological work.
12) Poems like the wheelbarrow poem seek to wake the reader up to art by making the reader aware of form; seek to make the reader focus on the act of reading; seek to wake us up to the poem as its own reality, not a copy of the world; while at the same time seeking to make the reader more aware of the cutting edge of the moment of perception in the reading act in service of a theory of art as an immanent spiritual experience.
13) It does this in part by breaking perception into component parts like parts of a machine: red wheel/barrow, first you see the red wheel and then the barrow. All that is missing is the lever to complete the machine. White/chickens and rain/water function the same way: Images broken so the senses engage before we recombine the object into an image.

There is much more in the article--from Heidegger to I.A. Richards--but that's the thumbnail version.

And yup, William, I do talk in the article quite a bit about WCW and Chinese poetry, but I won't go into that here--that's more of a clearing of the throat before I get into the heart of the argument.

Best, Tony

Recently discovered!

14.

so much extends
from

a golden hair
piece

atop a white
fascist

bowed to Moscow's
tyrant

Thanks so much, Tony, for adding your thoughts to the thread. I was thinking about sending you an invite via PM, but I'm glad you found your way here to enlighten and inform.

I feel like a doofus for never having thought of the Wheelbarrow poem as formal, and I thank you for setting me straight.

I am keenly interested in reading the Measure article.

I'd also like to put in a plug for this book, which I believe I've mentioned before on the Sphere.

Edited in:

It would be remiss at this point not to include this brilliant poem in this thread:

**

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning


Link to painting

Good reading

Dad, Mom, what's a wheel-barrow?
 

Wheelbarrows have joined thimbles, at least as down-and-going cultural icons in a brave new world that yet has the game of Monopoly in it.

News.com Australia

L.A. Times

npr USA