*This December, I am reblogging some of the more popular poems and articles that I have posted in the course of the past year. I am particularly gratified that this article that I originally posted in early 2014, when I was still very new to blogging, in homage to my favorite English-language poet, has continued to attract visitors in 2015. I plan to write more about Williams in coming months.*

Modernist English-language poetry was originally shaped by the triumvirate of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams—all of them American. Each had a clear private agenda and a highly distinctive style. If Williams does not feature so prominently in the canon, it is probably because he eschewed European affectations and peregrinations, preferring to stay in his home town in New Jersey and work, as he put it, firmly ‘in the American grain’.

Williams alludes here to the traditional craftsmanship of US architecture, opposing it to Europe’s pompous cathedrals, the over-ornamentation of the Jugendstil, or the pared-down but still overbearing mass-produced aesthetic of Le Corbusier. His aim was to be a modernist poet in the mode of Frank Lloyd Wright, producing humble, carefully crafted work on a human scale; poems to be lived in, not monuments to ideology or flourishes to be shown off to aesthetically-minded patrons and fair-weather friends.

Williams is perhaps most widely remembered for The Red Wheelbarrow and This is just to say—unpretentious, unconventional proto-minimalist poems, whose seemingly contemporary feel drew praise and imitations from 1960s pop artists and Liverpool poets alike. These pleasingly entertaining and not entirely throwaway poems are not however representative of the broader sweep of his work.

As a whole, Williams’ contribution to English poetry remains stunningly fresh, even (perhaps especially) in a soi-disant post-modern era where the fireworks and bombast of Eliot and Pound have pretty much fizzled out. His poems are simple, perfectly structured, and reach out to the reader, with a down-to-earth humanity and sympathy for nature; as if, like the flowers he adored so much, they had just sprouted from the ground.

This is not to say that Williams was some throwback to a Romantic age of 19^th century nature-worship. He had absorbed the lessons of Housman, Whitman, Hardy and Clare and a certain nostalgia for the loss of common land, but was, nevertheless, a fully-fledged modernist in the truest sense of the term. He looked resolutely forward, never back.

He was able to dovetail the sounds of words together in an entirely novel way that does not simply rage against or fall ultimately in with the marching-band of rhyme. He mastered a new kind of poetic tempo, drawn from natural speech, which is neither rhythmical in the traditional mode nor mere prosaic discourse dolled up as verse.

I do not know the extent to which Williams was aware of recent developments in the relatively new sciences of linguistics and phonetics. But his craft seems to operate primarily at the level of the phoneme and tone unit, rather than the old-fashioned artificial devices of foot and fixed line. Williams uses individual phonemes the way pointillist and impressionist painters used dots of pigment and smears of colored paint.

At his best, tempo, color, mood, humanity and the combined sound of words align themselves in a harmony that rivals nature itself. The first long immaculately lined and paced sentence of The Widow’s Lament in Springtime approaches perfection in this regard. The broader and hence more deliberately vapid synesthetic canvas of Burning the Christmas Greens achieves something of the same effect, producing, with its thumping anaphora, some kind of unforgettable secular Christmas carol.

But Williams was not just a master painter of verbal sound; he played with semantics too. Just as the sound of words is sensed and arranged by Williams in terms of naturally-occurring phonemes and patterns of tone to produce something radically new, so he draws on the inherent ambiguity of words and grammatical devices, in such a way as to create a precise blur that both echoes the simplicity of the real and expresses the awe it nevertheless inspires in us…

Queen Anne’s Lace may well be Williams’s master work, distilling his unique skills into a peerless blend of craftsmanship, humanity, ambiguity, novelty, and feel for the sublime.

Before his best work, we find ourselves, as he puts it in the final stanza of the Christmas Greens:

“breathless to be witnesses,

as if we stood

ourselves refreshed among

the shining fauna of that fire.”

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash