[Roger Slater]

Skimble-skamble? I like it. I also liked Chris's poem, though I don't share his view of the Wallace Stevens poem in question, which I don't happen to care for all that much but which seems to me justifiably well-known and obviously quite skillful. There are many other Wallace Stevens poems that I prefer and which I admire deeply. The last section of "Esthetique du Mal" is some wonderful and powerful stuff indeed.

The fact that we're still talking about the red wheelbarrow so many decades after it was written, and that at least a few educated and committed students of poetry seem to like it very much, is empyric proof that there must be something "there" whatever your ultimate verdict may be. I think Chris's initial explanation was pretty close to the mark. I also think it's enormously difficult for any of us to react to the poem in the context of its day, and that the poem was far more path-breaking than it's apt to strike readers today who think of it virtually as a cliche.

Anyway, I've written many bad poems, but I'd be surprised if any of my bad poems were being debated 70 years from now. For most of us, the only chance we have of being discussed 70 years from now is to write exceptionally fine poems... if WCW managed the trick by writing only crap, he's perhaps more of a genius than anyone suspected.

[Richard Wakefield]

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

[nyctom]

Of course, so much depends upon if you think it is bad in the first place.

[Jan D. Hodge]

I would sometimes ask students on an intro to lit final (partly as an excuse to give "bonus" points; mostly for my own curiosity) to pick any poem we read that they particularly liked and say briefly why. One student once chose D. Rossetti's "The Woodspurge" because "my father had died a few weeks before we read it, and I knew exactly what he [Rossetti] felt." That seems to me a very good reason to read and like a poem.

David Mason posted the anecdotal context for TRW:
"Dr. Williams's poem reportedly contains a personal experience: he was gazing from the window of the house where one of his patients, a small girl, lay suspended between life and death..." Assuming some truth in that, it explains much about how the poem captures a psychological [if not necessarily logical] reality in artistic (formal) terms.

Whether or not autobiographical or other knowledge can or should be brought to bear when judging a poem is a whole new critical arena, but it can sometimes explain a lot. Another example [also from the Kennedy/Gioia text]:

Sir, say no more,
Within me 'tis as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind's poor birds.

This, by Trumbull Stickney, can be seen as simply a more-or-less interesting exercise in image/simile, but probably comes to mean more if one knows that Stickney was suffering from brain cancer. Does that knowledge make it a (better) poem? Maybe that's not the question to ask--or at least not the only one.

Cheers,
Jan

[Richard Wakefield]

Jan:
It's a good question: How much should our knowledge of the writer's circumstances influence our appreciation of the poem? My vote is for lots and lots. My purpose in reading poetry is not to get a glimpse of platonic verities (although I guess it's nice if that happens), but rather to get closer to another human being -- and "another human being" can be the writer, of course, or another reader, or even another version of myself. If the biographical details of that other person's life help me get closer, so much the better.
Of course there's a balancing act. My wife and I have boxes of our childrens' childhood art; we can't bear to part with it, we love it, but we know that no museum wants it. We're fully aware of it's artistic limitations. Same thing with poetry: I may know so much about your situation that I respond strongly to a poem even while being aware of its artistic limitations. Maybe one way to gauge artistic success is to consider how little of the artist's life we need to know in order to connect with her or his work -- Shakespeare being perhaps the foremost example...
RPW