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In his exploratory study of modern American poets, economist David Galenson limited his analysis to 11 outstanding innovators who averaged more than three poems per anthology. Of the 11, six were finders and five were seekers -- experimental poets tending to do their most important work later in their careers. That was the career pattern for all five: Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Each of the five was also known for detailed observations. In the case of Williams, Moore and Bishop, they focused sharply on the world around them. Lowell and Stevens put more emphasis on the relationship between their interior life and their observations. Like many seekers, most of the five struggled to finish poems or frequently revised previously completed works.
William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963: medical and poetic observer
Both as a physician and as a poet, William Carlos Williams saw his first task as making careful observations of what was in front of him. That made concrete descriptions of daily life crucial in his poetry, as is typical of many poetic seekers.
Williams said that was “the poet’s business”: “Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a physician works, upon a patient, upon the thing before him, in the particular to discover the universal.”
Williams’s detailed observation of the physical world was a quality that made his work stand out for poet-critic Randall Jarrell, who said, “the first thing one notices about Williams’s poetry is how radically sensational and perceptual it
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William Carlos Williams, medically trained observer
These dozen lines, written by Williams at age 51, tied for No. 12 on the list of most frequently reprinted poems. The poem’s close observation of daily life and its simple, evocative, conversational language are typical of many experimental poets’ works.
This Is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
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is: ‘Say it! No ideas but in things.’ ”
For Williams, like many other experimental poets, observation of the world includes
listening to the language that people commonly use.
Incorporating spoken language was fundamental to Williams’s poems, according to critic Alan Shucard, who noted “his lifelong desire to invent a poetry rooted in American speech and experience, to convey a sense of felt life in his work by bringing poetry down from the pedestal of high art and locating it firmly in the familiar terrain of the poet’s immediate environment.”
Roberet Lowell commented about the long Williams poem “Paterson” that “for experience and observation, it has, along with a few poems of Frost’s, a richness that makes almost all other contemporary poetry look a little secondhand.”
Like the poetry of other successful seekers, Williams’s work improved with age. Of the 371 appearances of Williams poems in anthologies – second only to Robert Frost – only two were written before age 32.
In terms of anthology entries, his best years were ages 33, 38, 40, 51 and 59. The overall list of 20 most-reprinted modern American poems includes three by Williams, each of them written between ages 40 and 60. They are “The Red Wheelbarrow,” from age 40; “This is Just to Say,” from age 51; and “The Dance,” from age 59.
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