III.

Poetic Ideas

Poetry was, for Williams, a crucial and necessary—yet sometimes ignored—means of communicating. In “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” (1955), he wrote, 'It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.' Williams's ideas were basically humanistic: respect yourself and others, love those you can, and try to make the world a better place. He tried to live up to these ideals through both his writing and his medical practice. One quality that Williams admired greatly was persistence; he loved old people who kept their vigorous response to life, just as he admired artists who kept improving and perfecting their work.

Williams’s straightforward approach to writing marked a new direction for poetry. In shaping his idea of what this new poetry should be, Williams emphasized four qualities. The first was the use of commonplace subjects and themes. The poet must write about things people can respond to, things people have seen and know. Otherwise, literature stands separate from its readers.

The second principle for the new poetry was the poet’s duty to write about real events or objects in a language that all people could understand, with an ear for the way people actually speak. Williams called his language 'the American idiom' and stressed repeatedly that it was different from formal English in that it allowed for speech patterns that could violate grammatical rules. He delighted in experimenting with short poems that were little more than fragments of speech capturing individual moments, thoughts, feelings, or images, as in 'This Is Just To Say' (1934): “I have eaten/ the plums/ that were/ in the icebox...”

The third attribute for the new poetry was specificity. Williams objected to traditional poetry that talked in generalities, such as poems that treated love, death, anger, and friendship as abstractions rather than as real things. Fighting against what he called aboutness, Williams coined the phrase 'No ideas but in things.' This meant that his poetry made its point by focusing attention on concrete reality. To show an emotion such as love, he would write about the everyday gestures that represented the emotion, such as a heartfelt apology. Also, Williams paid attention to simple objects, like red wheelbarrows, that other poets ignored, and he found poetic qualities in these everyday objects.

The fourth principle of Williams's new poetics was the poet’s responsibility to write about his or her locale, or in the wording he preferred, local. Williams believed that only by knowing a small fragment of life thoroughly could anyone hope to understand the total picture of human existence. Much of his own writing efforts for more than a decade went into the epic Paterson, a long poem presenting his local, which was industrialized New Jersey. Nature, represented in the poem by the Passaic River and its well-known falls, met with industry in the town of Paterson, where the falls provided waterpower to the area. In the work Williams made a number of statements about modern life—for instance about the importance, to cities and people, of observing and maintaining specific details in order to maintain a sense of individuality and importance.

Toward the end of his life Williams was recognized as an important influence on younger poets. Long before he was esteemed by critics, such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, and Denise Levertov paid tribute to old 'Doc Williams,' the man who meshed two careers into one highly productive life. Williams’s letters to these poets and to others resulted in numerous collections, including The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957) and several volumes published after his death, such as The Last Word: Letters between Marcia Nardi and William Carlos Williams (1994), Pound/Williams: Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996), and The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998).