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Selected Poems (William Carlos Williams)
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Pictures from Brueghel ...
Looking like an unassuming college professor or a local pharmacist in all the photos that you'll ever see, William Carlos Williams was a man who was touched by genius, brilliance and even boldness. Here was a man who was surrounded by some of the great modern writers of his day and was beset on all sides by `New Modernists' and yet still had the strength not to acquiesce or cow-tow under the weight of the ivory tower grumblers. Becoming a literary great in his off time from being a General Practitioner was probably just a hobby for him that went further than he would've imagined.
The New Modernists would struggle today to ignore someone like Williams, claiming a lack of form, meter and pacing. These people are all fools. If Bill Shakespeare were alive today he'd probably be writing haiku's with a sharpie on the bare bottoms of New York runway models at 3am - not policing writers to follow the iambic pentameter.
In this book is a set of poems titled: Pictures from Brueghel (1962). All of these are poetic reflections upon Brueghel's paintings (with the h) and are all absolutely moving and thoughtful. These are some of my favourite poetic pieces from Western literature.
I purchased this book in 2003 and have yet to remove it from my nightstand. William Carlos Williams delivers with a wry smile and a heavy shadow.
As for the Red Wheelbarrow ... it never moved me either. Literally or figuratively.
So much depends upon...
You know the red wheelbarrow poem? The bloody dumb red wheelbarrow beside those idiot white chickens? Glistening in sunlight? The wheelbarrow, not the chickens. Glistening. Though if plucked and cooked for a good two hours at 275 degrees, the chickens are bound to glisten too.
Fifteen years and many humbling events later, I can honestly say I've come around. Mr. Williams is an amazing and brilliant poet. I've even grown fond of The Red Wheelbarrow, mostly because it has remained a point of irritation and amusement. I guess it's like a little jazz riff of a poem. Williams' voice is said to be almost Cubist in language. Fractured. Yet the words recall simple things from rural life. Despite my initial dislike, The Red Wheelbarrow's a pretty good example of this. But it's his other poetry that I find really moving. I am reminded a bit of Steinbeck in his choice of images that are at times harsh and other times comforting. Just as Steinbeck was a very American author, Williams Carlos Williams is a very American poet.
Politically liberal and Unitarian, Williams practiced medicine as a pediatrician and delivered over 2,000 babies in his lifetime. It seems bizarre to think that this very busy doctor, who actually visited his patients in home (complete with leather bag), had a succesful literary career and keen and discerning interest in poetry of a modern bent. Williams wrote in the evenings after work and on the weekends. The image of the in-call doctor is so old-fashioned. A good juxtaposition with his writing style.
Great Poet. Poor Selection 
(Skip to the bottom of this review if you want the quick version.)
The title of this edition is "Selected Poems." I don't know exactly what process of "selection" Tomlinson used in choosing the poems to include in this collection, but I imagine it involved something in the way of either dice or some variation of dart throwing or the close-your-eyes-and-see-where-your-finger-lands method.
Let me now say that I truly love the poetry of William Carlos Williams. While his work did not really become popular until the post-modern era, Williams is a strictly imagistic modernist, and in my eyes he is the epitome of modernist poetry. Like I said, his strict adherence to literal _things_ and images, combined with his genius use of the line (unmatched to this day), and a beauty that resonates far beyond the page makes for one of the greatest poetry collections of the twentieth century.
My problem, as I said, is not with Williams (far from it), but with this collection (I can no longer bring myself to call it a selection). This collection, while obviously containing "The Red Wheelbarrow," has excluded some of Williams's crucial poems. The following poems have been ommitted from this collection: "The Young Housewife," "Queen-Anne's-Lace," "Portrait of a Lady, "Willow Poem," "The Dead Baby," and "Lear." While the poetry in this edition is certainly great, simply because it is taken from the portfolio of William Carlos Williams, these poems are critical to any reader of Williams's poetry, and, for some reason, have been left out, overlooked, or forgotten, I am not sure. I would suggest that anyone who is intereste in Williams's poetry just spend the extra money and purchase the complete works (whose publisher eludes me at this time, and which I think is in two volumes).
While I have bashed Tomlinson for his choice of works to include in this collection, I will say that one good part about this book is his introduction. I provides a helpful analysis to understanding Williams if you need help with that.
If you enjoy only lofty diction and language such as that used by T.S. Eliot (whose work _The Waste Land_ Williams actually called a "catastrophe"), you may want to look into some of Williams's poetry before purchasing a collection. Williams uses direct, literal, and simple (though absolutely not simplistic) language. The beauty of it lies in the actual view of the images his poetry presents.
QUICK VERSION
Do not buy THIS collection, because it is vastly incomplete. William Carlos Williams is a great poet, and crucial works have been omitted. Purchase at least one of the volumes of his complete works instead.
Red Wheel Barrow--lots more going on than meets the eye
In my poetry class we had this big discussion about Red Wheelbarrow and how it has a lot more going for it than meets the eye. Something with the etemology of "wheelbarrow" and the way he separates it in the second stanza.
That said, the poem taken at face value is, as many of WCW's poems are, a simple, beautiful image. The stark contrast of the red wheelbarrow and white chickens on a gray rainy day instantly paints a picture in my mind. WCW had a lot of new ideas (at the time) of how poems should be written and what they should accomplish. He can write the most simple, poignant verse about a flower that on a closer examination turns out to be about atom bombs. He is a very accessible poet--even for those unitiated with this seemingly scary world--and yet offers so much for those who wish to analyze.
The Red Wheelbarrow 
I really don't see how anyone can say that William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is an outstanding peice of work. I'm not going to trash the rest of his work because I find some of it to be quite good, but I would love to know how on earth that poem got published. I find it pointless and quite frankly, boring. And how people get three-page analyses of this poem leaves me in utter amazement that there actually are people with no life.
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