If Williams's poem is bad, it's bad in interesting ways -- which paradoxically makes it, in a sense, good. But look at what makes poems bad, and I mean the ones that march right up and announce their lousiness: cliche, forced rhyme, capricious line breaks, pedestrian imagery, "poetic" flourishes. This one has none of those weaknesses (even the line breaks, which appear so herky-jerky at first, are very regular). So if we claim it's bad, and if we hope to be able to explain its badness, we have a real challenge. (I don't claim that we have to be able to explain all of our likes and dislikes, but the theme of this forum is criticism, and criticism is at least an effort to explain, and it follows from the assumption that things of that nature CAN be explained.)
RPW
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