Quote:
Originally Posted by Max Goodman
So is your point about Williams, Rose. Thank you. What should I look for in his poems? The standard harping on "the thing itself" has never helped me much appreciate them.
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Have you ever read the complete
Spring and All? If it doesn't speak for itself to you I don't know that I have any secret key, because all I'd say is to repeat less beautifully what Williams says there...
But, in brief: Williams is (alongside, and differently from, Stevens) the great 20th century poet of the imagination.
Spring and All is a great paean to and treatise on the imagination, an overflowing maximalist masterpiece.
That "maximalist" is important. Read the wheelbarrow poem out of context, and you'd think Williams is a minimalist. But in the context of
Spring and All it's wholly different: a dense
condensation and
crystallization of numerous lines of force stretching into and out of it from the rest of the poem.
I never "got" Williams until I read
Spring and All last September. But now it's among the 5-7 books I consider truly sacred.