Art that simply asks "how can this be art" seems terribly sterile to me, but "found art", when it was new, might hope to do something more: it tries to get us to look at ordinary things with the attention and expectations we bring to art. Insofar as it does this, it does what art is supposed to do -- to get us to see the world afresh.
The trouble is that this strategy wears out very quickly -- after the third or fourth found object, people just think "oh, more mundane objects presented as art" and yawn.
At a time when metrical expectations were firmly established in the minds of readers, getting them to look at a bit of ordinary prose AS poetry may well produce an interesting musical effect -- something akin to syncopation. And if you are expecting elevated Tennysonian language, the very blandness of the Wheelbarrow sentence may be striking.
The odd breaks may well focus our attention, so long as we are expecting them to make more sense.
So, much depends upon the very expectations Williams is himself eroding.
So maybe Williams's poem really was a poem. But THIS explanation of why it is a poem makes it hard to see how free verse can be written today -- now that readers come to poetry almost without expectations.
I am not arguing against free verse or saying that it is only prose. Rather, I'm pointing to the limitation of one defense of free verse, and asking if anyone knows a justification without such limitations. Can someone explain how free verse works AS VERSE without playing off metrical expectations?
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