Pre-Modernist and Modernist Poetics

Posted on Feb 21, 2025 in English Studies

Pre-Modernist Poetics: Romantic Experimentation

Texts by Wordsworth and Keats

Is common life the typical content of romance?
No, common topics were court, mythology, or religion.
What kind of language does the author intend to use in his poetry?
A language that presents ordinary things as unusual aspects shall be used in poetry according to Wordsworth, making common life appear interesting through language, coloring it. Not necessarily through ostentatious language, but through excitement.
Is this poetics fundamentally based on imagination?
Not solely on imagination, but on an enrichment of the poet’s relationship with its context.
Why does the author choose rustic life as the raw material for his poetry?
Wordsworth argues that rural life is rich in these common topics, lacks distraction from society and thus alienation and complications that come from it. The poetry can rely then on simpler, more elementary feelings. Also, the language in the rural medium is easier to understand. Lastly, rural life is unequivocally more closely connected to raw nature.
Does the author intend to reproduce with absolute accuracy the language of rural people?
Not with accuracy, as the author idealizes this rural language –one presumably based on sameness and simplicity away from alienation– and tries to achieve and perform his own ideal.
What is the objective of this poetics? How do you interpret the adjective “philosophical” applied to the language of rustic people?
The objective of this poetics is to convey and express feelings; to make feel. To express an overflow of powerful feelings. In that sense, “philosophical” may refer to a sort of systematic, closer to reality, a more descriptive way to write poetry.
What does the author say about sophisticated language in poetry?
It is a performance of some poets who think it may add to the artistry in their poetry.

“Read Me a Lesson Muse and Speak It Loud”

What do you know about the Muse?
She is in a natural, high and foggy, almost unreachable realm.
What symbolism do you see in the speaker’s location?
Mist or shroud; hiding the muse.
Identify elements in the poem with a metaphoric meaning.
Being on top of the –mental– earth may refer to feeling overwhelmed by poetry.
What does the speaker say about Hell and Heaven?
Heaven and Hell seem to be close, almost next to where the speaker is.
What does he say about self-knowledge?
Self-knowledge is very limited, given we are confined in inscrutable nature.
What are the speaker’s feelings?
He uses a tone of resigned acceptance, hindrance towards his blindness, about his lack of knowledge on himself and nature.
Discuss the concept of negative capability in relation to this poem. First, from the author’s perspective; then, from the speaker’s perspective.
The speaker tries to accept his blindness, to accept uncertainty and doubts created by mist of mind; reaching still after his senses, through his mind.
Formal analysis.

The Poet

Is the poet described in this poem a modern poet? Justify your answer.
Is poetry considered an alternative instrument for the acquisition of knowledge?
Not exactly, poetry is a tool among many others, a conduit wherein one may seek truth and beauty.
How do you interpret the last two lines? Is the speaker identified with the poet he describes?
Keats may seek to be this poet, revealing elements of good and fair. Nonetheless, these last lines indicate he is not quite there yet, however, he is comfortable in the lack of knowledge.
Experts on Keats’s poetry have doubts about the authorship of this poem. If we use “negative capability” as the key to identify the author, can we conclude that Keats is the author?
We could yet state that the poet reveals, lights and sees; principles seemingly contrary to negative capability. Nonetheless, Keats is describing, maybe mocking, here an idealized poet.
Formal analysis.

“Old Man Travelling”

Identify the characters in the poem.
The Old Man whose son is dying and the speaker, who sees him and interacts with him.
What kind of speaker do you find in the poem?
The speaker uses third person, it is observant and absolutely reliant on senses, constantly supporting his expression on the apparent nature of the observed.
What is the speaker’s attitude towards the main character?
The speaker admittedly feels a sort of adoration, certain envy; jealousy of the observed apparent peace and composure.
Explain the role of nature in the poem and the meaning of the subtitle.
“Animal tranquility and decay” may refer to the Old Man’s temperament; he confronts the nature of death with a feral calmness.
How do you interpret the last four lines?
They are the Old Man’s reason to be traveling.
Discuss aboutness and fromness in the poem.
Formal analysis.
It is Blank Verse.

Pre-Modernist Poetics: Symbolism

The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons

Is intelligibility a characteristic feature of the symbolist poem?
Not really, the requisite really to symbolism is to aim in poetry to transmit a sensation, producing feelings on the reader. In order to do so, the poet must usually take his or her own experience from those feelings, creating a perfect atmosphere then able to properly communicate feelings.
What is the maxim of symbolist poetics?
“To name is to destroy, to suggest is to create”.
What is the origin of the symbolist poem?
Sensations, experience along with the poet’s aim to transmit that feeling.
Explain the process in the creation of a symbolist poem?
The first thing is to transform the sensation into rhythm. There is no rational way of understanding the poem, but with your senses; almost physically. Moreover, words are placed over that existing rhythm and a poem is created.
Why does “every word” seem “like a desecration”?
Each word is a desecration because they are distant from the original sensation.
At the end of the creative process, are the stages of that process visible to the reader?
They should not be, it should be a flawless unit, yet with relation from point to point.
What is the reader’s likely reaction when confronted with the symbolist poem?
Confusion, overwhelming sensation as if confronted with a “not unnatural bewilderment”.
Explain the relation between self-expression and impersonality in Mallarmé’s poetics.
It is objectivist, one should take the self as starting point yet no trace of it would be found in the final piece. There is an elocutionary disappearance of the poet.
Explain the similarities between symbolism and music.
The jumpstart of both is rhythm, both are bodily, both unintelligible.
Why can symbolism be considered an avant-garde movement?
The impersonality and the experimentation in form are two huge reasons to consider symboles an avant-garde movement.

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) may have had the most singular and enduring influence on his country and national literature of any 20th-century author. Yeats’ eclectic variety of styles and themes mirrored the evolving society in which he lived and inspired subsequent generations of authors. He tried to “pound his feelings into harmony at one point, but his best prose came from his own internal struggles and ideological inconsistencies in order to engage life’s full complexities. From a young age, Yeats was interested in poetry. Many of his early books, many of which were published before he turned 20, reflect the influence of Romantic poets such as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” which includes elements of mysticism, and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” an idealized and romantic poem about rural life, are two noteworthy examples. Any of the early poems features, such as the emphasis on unrequited love and an obsession with fantasies and illusions, remained familiar themes during Yeats’s long and varied career. Yeats’s older, more formal and exalted vocabulary of Romanticism continues to develop into a more colloquial and straightforward manner of expression in poems like “Adam’s Curse” After meeting the prominent poet and critic Ezra Pound in 1909, this change persisted. Pound became Yeats’s secretary and helped reshape his fiction significantly. Poems from this period are commonly regarded as Yeats’s first Modernist poems, such as “To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing” and “September 1913”. Yeats and other authors and writers were starting to understand that the vocabulary they used to depict ancient wars, among other things, was obsolete in the face of the modern upheaval of the early twentieth century, as shown by the dramatic stylistic shifts between “To Ireland in the Coming Times” and “September 1913.” Since, as he writes in an earlier poem, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave,” there will be no more talk of “the poor worm hiding down in its little cave, / The field-mouse racing past me in the grass…,” because “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

While Yeats had always been fascinated by folklore, mysticism, and even the supernatural, these realms started to have a profound influence on his work in the middle of his career. Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Lees in 1917, and the two started experimenting with automatic (or unconscious, spirit-driven) writing shortly after. As a result of these events, he developed a revived and extended interest in magic and mysticism, which he recorded in his book A Vision (1925). Yeats created complex ideas about life and history as a result of his joint work with his partner, assuming that such repetitive phenomena existed. “The Second Coming,” a masterpiece and a satire of post–WWII Europe, picked up this idea: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats remained reflective on his own life in Ireland at other moments, perhaps influenced by war’s relentless reminder of death, as in “Prayer for My Daughter”.

The Wild Swans At Coole (1919)

What is the season and the time in the day mentioned in the first stanza?
The season is autumn, the month October, oddly, it is not raining and it is twilight.
What is the setting described in the poem?
A park with a pond.
What feelings do you associate with the elements described in the first stanza and the setting?
Melancholy is expressed through tones and images of the poem. Everything but the swans seem to be, if not cold, frozen in time or still.
What is the time span mentioned by the speaker?
Seconds maybe, from the time he sees the swans up until they fly away.
What is the theme of the poem?
Swans are an idealization of stillness of beauty, and how even they fly thunderously.
Is it possible for a watcher to count 59 swans while they are drifting on the water? Is there a symbolic meaning in that count?
It may have, mainly, a rhythmic purpose; supported also by the inversion of nine and fifty in the poem.
What symbolism do you see in the swans?
They seem to be a metaphor for youthful and passionate life.
How do you interpret the image of the lake without swans at the end of the poem?
Passing of time, even nature changes and decays.
What is the speaker’s view about nature?
It symbolizes the passage of time and the worrying that it implies and humans’ mortality.
Is “The Wild Swans at Coole a symbolist poem?
Formal analysis.
It is a regular stanza form: five six-line stanzas, each written in a roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines in tetrameter, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in trimeter, and the fifth line in pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABABDD.

Adam’s Curse (1904)

Before you read the poem, identify the curse the speaker alludes to
Adam’s expulsion from paradise, excluding Eve.
Explain the connotations of the “summer’s end” mentioned at the beginning of the poem and of “the last embers of daylight” mentioned at the end of the poem.
Summer ending might mean the beginning of the decay of life; as does the last embers of daylight, the fall of the day and the beginning of night – death and cold. The ending of love, passion and heat.
Identify the characters. Is the speaker a character?
There are three characters, two women and the poetic voice, which, yes, it is a character.
Underline and explain the metapoetic content of the poem.
When the poetic voice says: “A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment”. They are talking about the whole process of poetic production, and that is the metapoetic element. He thinks that though poetry requires hard work, it should not look like it was hard to the reader. In this sense, poetry is much like love, and he misses the old times when poetry was more valued and the old ways of conquering a lover.
What is the speaker’s profession?
The poetic production; which is as hard a work as any physical work; it is hard to create but it should look like it was easy to the reader. He compares the process to the stitching and unstitching, like putting it all together and then taking it all apart next.
How are women represented in the poem?
What is the speaker’s view about women and love? Is he in love?
He was in love with activist Maud; he was an old fashioned man while she was a modern woman, maybe that’s why he was so in love with her, because she was unattainable for him.
Do you detect symbolism in the poem?
The reader has to evoke feelings; they are not plainly presented but suggested. This is more precisely seen in the stanza on the Moon. This sense of beauty and the sense of decay are paramount characteristics of Symbolism.
How do you interpret the conclusion of the poem?
The conclusion of the poem is that he is aware that using the old ways to seduce the a new woman will result in failure, on a feeling of impotence in him.
Formal analysis.
Most of the poem is iambic, all of it pentameter. The rhyme is distributed in couplets. The overall scheme resembles the heroic couplet –with enjambment though.

Thomas Hardy

The poetry of Thomas Hardy is inextricably linked to his life. After the death of his wife, Emma, in 1912, the poet wrote his brilliant poetry from 1912 to 1913. According to biographer Claire Tomalin, Hardy’s Emma poems are “the best and strangest celebrations of the deceased in English poetry.” Shortly after Emma’s death, Hardy married Florence Dugdale, a lady nearly 40 years his junior. He struggles to come to terms with the death of both his wife and his affection for her several years ago in the poems. The works are riddled with both regret and awe. Hardy’s poetry, while being characterized as bleak and bitter, pay heed to the transcendent possibilities of tone, line, and breath—musical language’s facets. Any observer might point out all the flaws in Hardy’s poetry, but it’s difficult to put into words what it is about his poetry that makes it so strangely brilliant. Hardy, on the other hand, has often provided academics and commentators with an inconsistent body of work. Since Hardy’s position in literature has always been contentious, continuous reevaluation is important to preserve the balance between current and historical viewpoints. “Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.”Virginia Woolf observed.

The Convergence Of The Twain

Identify the “she” in the poem.
It is a ship on the bottom of the sea.
What do the stanzas II, III, IV and V describe?
Wealthy people, narcissistic people identified with opulence and alienation through the mirrors.
Who asks the question about “vaingloriousness”?
The fishes do, concerned with their environment, it is nature asking itself about the artificiousness of the human-made ship.
Identify the “creature of cleaving wings”?
The ship is being identified as a natural being.
Who is the creator of this creature? What is the meaning of “immanence”?
Time is the creator. The meaning of immanence is determination.
Can you relate this poem with naturalism?
Yes, it has to do with the determinist message of the poem.
What does the “sinister mate” allude to?
The Iceberg.
What does “the Spinner of the Years” refer to?
The pass of time.
Discuss the relationship between culture and nature in the poem.
They are two poles, contraries.
Formal analysis. Find examples of alliteration.

Imagism

A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste

Presentation without Elaboration

Say if the following statements are true or false according to the information in the text:

The objective of imagist poetics is to recount the poet’s emotional experiences.
False; combination of intellect and emotion.
The maxim of imagism might be “presentation without elaboration”.
True.
The imagist poem is liberating for both the poet and the reader.
True.
Superfluous words must be excluded; so only accurate adjectives will be used.
True.
The imagist poet often expresses his/her own opinions in the poem.
False.
The imagist poet describes reality as objectively as possible.
False.
The use of rhyme in the imagist poem must not be conventional.
True.
The imagist poet can be compared with the scientist if he/she is an innovative poet.
True.
The imagist poem is more universal than the symbolist poem.
False.
Ornament is not accepted in the imagist poem.
False; they have to be necessary though.

Keys to Wallace Stevens’s Poetics and Poems

Wallace Stevens is the other poet from the American context that we are going to study in this course. Like Eliot, he advocates difficult poetry. For Eliot, poetry should be difficult to be in accordance with the complexity of the modern world. Stevens’s justification is different: difficulty is necessary to make the reader get involved in the generation of meaning, which is always a result of the merger of horizons -Gadamer terminology- between the text and the reader. This makes Stevens closer to the principles of symbolism rather than to those of imagism: indirectness in detriment of directness. The difficulty of the poem makes possible an interaction with it which is previous to understanding. Remember Eliot’s idea of “communication before understanding” and Mallarme’s proposal of extreme abstraction in which the poem becomes unintelligible. Stevens is neither radically abstract nor unintelligible, but does not want to be too accessible. Like in Williams, the relationship between imagination and reality is also very important in Stevens’s poetics. For Williams, imagination is not a removal from reality: imagination moves reality to find out new elements and perspectives which are materialized in poems. Stevens considers that imagination plays another role: it imposes order and/ or beauty on reality/ nature. Stevens has been accused of being subjectivist and romantic, but he denies this. He, like all modernist poets, wanted to be identified as objectivist, and he defended his objectivism by arguing that reality is the basis for all creativity. In fact, he called reality “the necessary angel”. However, reality is vulgar, ugly or chaotic and needs the enrichment provided by human creativity. Because of his emphasis on the supremacy of the human mind over nature, his poetics has been identified as anthropocentric. Most of his poems deal with the relationship between imagination and reality. He did not believe in an absolute and definitive way of establishing that relationship, so the process of approach and discussion is endless in his poetry. On the other hand, he associates imagination with the concept of fiction. He vindicates fictions, which he identifies with all the products of human creativity. However modest a human creation is superior to reality/ nature and enriches it. But poetry is the supreme fiction. This idea of fiction as the defining feature of humankind, the idea of the world as a fable, shows the influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Stevens’s poetry has also a hedonistic trait, which is connected with Nietzsche’s vindication of Dionysus, the God who celebrates the sensations of the body versus the rational and well-balanced Apollo. Thus, Stevens’s poetry vindicates sensuality and pleasure and all those fictions which in one way or another favor the enjoyment of life. He, like Nietzsche, is a vitalist. In Stevens’s poetry there are some surrealistic elements. This feature is consistent with his poetics, as surrealism implies an overflowing of creativity. To analyze his poems and come to conclusions about their meaning, we have to identify those elements which symbolize fiction/ human creativity and those who stand for reality/ nature. Sometimes it is also necessary to distinguish between vitalist fictions and repressive fictions. The analysis of the following poems will help us understand these fundamental aspects of Stevens’s poetics.

Keys to “Vortex”, Pound’s Manifesto of Vorticism

Ezra Pound was the founder and leader of the imagist movement, the term imagism being his creation. He organized the first anthology of imagist poems, Des Imagistes, but then broke with the movement he had founded and referred to the movement as “amygism”, an ironical allusion to Amy Lowell, the American poet who replaced him as leader of the movement and organizer of the next three anthologies. The minimalist imagist poem did not give the most talented poets the chance to write great poems. In fact, some of the most important works of High Modernism are long narrative poems, which in Pound’s case, were not incompatible with the influence of imagism. The expansion of the poem by the juxtaposition of images, fragments, quotations, etc. can perfectly comply with the imagist principle of “presentation without elaboration”. Another thing is whether the reader is capable of experiencing the poem with the immediacy the poet takes for granted. Pound was not aware of the cultural gap between the author and the average reader, in most cases unable to interpret the great amount of cultural allusions made by the poet. In Gadamerian terms, the merger of horizons between the average reader and the text is very difficult because of that gap. The same challenge again: the reader must grow as a reader to understand and enjoy the modernist experiments. In the manifesto of Vorticism, Pound mentions those elements of imagism he continues to be identified with and those he intends to overcome by his new poetics. His ideas were expressed in the magazine Blast which he founded together with the painter Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier Brzeska.

Similarities and differences between Vorticism and Imagism.
The first thing which Pound dislikes in imagism is passivity on the part of the poet. “You may think of man as that toward which perception moves. You may think of him as the TOY of circumstance, as the plastic substance RECEIVING impressions”. The poet as a toy who receives impressions does not correspond to the strong masculine creativity that Pound intended to represent. The poet of value is defined as “DIRECTING a certain fluid force against circumstance, as CONCEIVING instead of merely observing and reflecting”. This is a fundamental difference with imagism: energetic action instead of passive reception. The idea of a fluid force as the basis for the poet’s creativity is also important as one of the elements of the terminology used by Pound, which breaks with the rhetoric of humanism, something very common in avant-garde movements. The inspiration comes from the impersonality and implacability of a machine-like mind, rather than from the rational spiritual processes of the humanist. Another significant difference is the relationship with tradition. The imagists were anti-traditionalist; they believed they were inventing something completely new. The vorticist Pound values the presence of tradition in his poetry, that tradition which he calls “the energized past, all the past that is worthy to live”. The vortex integrates a tremendous variety of references that can be incorporated into the poem. It doesn’t matter from what epoch or culture they proceed if the contribute to the substance of the poem. Finally, there is something shared by the vorticist and the imagist: THE PRIMARY PIGMENT, on which “The vorticist relies… alone” because “every conception” and “every emotion, present itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form”. This primary pigment is not the result of any elaboration, and so implies the strict presentation of the thing. And, of course, this primary pigment is new and so “the most highly energized statement”, the one “that has not yet SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing”. “It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency”. In spite of Pound’s terminology, all these ideas also express the fundamental principle of imagism: “presentation without elaboration”.
Similarities and differences between Vorticism and Eliot’s poetics.
In his theory on impersonality, Eliot describes the poet as a mere medium in which a lot of heterogeneous experiences penetrate to be mixed there and produce new wholes in which the self of the poet is not present. He compared the mind of the poet with the filament of platinum in a catalyst, where two gasses are introduced to produce acids by their contact with that filament. In the final product there is no trace of the filament. The same is supposed to happen with the mature poet: no trace of the poet’s self will appear in the poem. The vortex is also an impersonal site into which innumerable things get to give rise to new wholes: “All experience rushes into this vortex”. In this respect, the vortex is similar to the medium, but the fundamental difference resides again in passivity. If we compare the medium with the vortex, the medium seems a very passive entity through which things pass while the vortex is a whirling frenzy. Everything whirls and is expelled because of that fluid force. Nothing is elaborated. The rational process is abolished. The poem emerges out of pure energy. The turbine is similar to the vortex. A mechanic force again, something inhuman guides the process of creation. There is nothing intellectual or discursive there. The anti-humanist rhetoric does not hide important similarities with Eliot’s theory on tradition. Pound’s views are similar to Eliot’s but Eliot’s humanist terminology probably would seem to him as soft as the symbolist poetics. It is easy to find equivalences in Eliot’s poetics for the terms used by Pound: if RACE is humankind, RACE-MEMORY is tradition and the historical sense is anticipated in the following statements: “All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live … All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW”. For Pound also is as important the pastness of the past as its presence in the present. For him also the RACE-MEMORY is a simultaneous order present for the poet NOW. However, the difference in the terminology is not trivial. Behind Eliot’s humanist rhetoric there is a nostalgia for a lost civilization; behind Pound’s anti-humanist rhetoric there is a violent craving for another civilization, one that can be profoundly uncivilized. Remember that he became a fanatic supporter of Benito Mussolini and of Fascism.
Similarities and differences between Vorticism and Futurism.
Futurism was an avant-garde movement founded in Italy by the writer Tommaso Marinetti and had also significant manifestations in the plastic arts. In his manifesto, Pound despises futurism, but his fascination with the mechanic, his dehumanized rhetoric, the compulsive way of writing suggested by the vortex, the allusions to energy, force, etc, are typical elements of the futurist aesthetics too. Besides, the identification with masculinity, strength, war and, as consequence of all this, the adherence to Fascism are features shared by Pound and the futurists. The only aspect in which Pound’s proposal is radically different from that of the futurists is the relationship with tradition. The futurists were against tradition and thought that they were creating outside tradition. As you have learned from Eliot’s Tradition and Individual Talent and from Pound’s manifesto on Vorticism, avant-garde creativity implies a more or less radical innovation in the context of tradition.
Pound’s view of hedonism.
Hedonism is a devotion to pleasure as a way of life, an existence “without force”. This is a reference to the Decadent Movement which at the end of the 19 th century, as a reaction against the restraint which had been dominant all over the century, vindicated the search for carnal and aesthetic pleasure as a kind of cultural revolution. Some of these artists had antidemocratic, individualistic and elitist ideas similar to those of many avant-garde artists, but for Pound the search for pleasure is incompatible with his strong and masculine aesthetics, again something a bit too soft for him. The French philosopher Deleuze argued that pleasure is the enemy of desire. Desire is the drive of all human action and pleasure implies discharge of its creative energy. For Pound pleasure is a discharge of energy.

Keys to William Carlos Williams’s Poetics and Poems

With Williams Carlos Williams we change from the European context of modernist poetry to the American one. Williams writes poetry whose universality stems from the reality of everyday American life. He is openly against the culturalism and sophistication of Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry. The reader is not going to be overwhelmed by either cultural allusions or baroque expression. In fact, the literal content of his poems is quite accessible. The difficulty comes when you have to critically analyze a poem. What can I say about something which seems so plain and direct? Williams’s poetics is going to help us understand the depths of his poetry, which is not simple at all and has a fundamental epistemological dimension. Williams thought that “Poetry is useful because it is useless”. Poetry has an epistemological dimension if it is used as an instrument to generate knowledge. And, in this respect, according to Williams, poetry is superior to science and technology because the first one is liable to be used for commercial purposes and the latter is always used for those purposes. So, the epistemological dimension of poetry is the purest of the three. Williams’s poems can be summarized in the motto “No ideas but in things”. This means that we must not impose our ideas on the things that surround us if we intend to find out or generate something new. We, so to say, must listen to what the world around us has to say. It is the only way in which new reality can be generated. If we impose our biases on what we see, the meaning of the things is already established and no novelty can emerge. “The poet thinks with his poem” is another statement by Williams which can be connected with this. No pre-existing thought creates the poem. The poem itself is the poet’s thought. Reality is fundamental for Williams, the poet has to deal with reality precisely to generate more reality, in his own words: “art… must be real, not realism, but reality itself”. It is very important to understand this. Reality for Williams is fundamental because the reality that already exists is the basis for the reality he intends to generate. However, this does not imply that Williams is a realist. Realism consists in the imitation of reality, the mimetic function of literature, and Williams’s objective is not to imitate reality but to generate it. How does he intend to do this? Imagination is the key element.

We tend to identify imagination with escapism. We would use it to escape momentarily from the unpleasant demands of reality. But Williams thinks differently: “the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal from reality. Imagination is not to avoid reality … poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it – It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore… it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature, but…”. Thus, the poet must use his imagination to move reality, which implies the generation of new perspectives and angles of approach to that reality, until he creates a new element, which is the poem. Williams’s poetics is objectivist because he does not impose his subjectivity on the things he observes, because his purpose is to generate reality with his poem and because this reality is something that many people can share. What he does is to create a new window to see reality and many people can see that reality from this new window. So, the poem is never a subjective experience or product. Williams’s poems are objectivist and relative. No window shows an absolute reality. This is why the poet must be looking all the time for new windows from which to present new realities. Steinman has compared this approach to reality with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Reality is so important for the creation of poetry that the poet must know it thoroughly. Williams argued that the social context closest to the poet must be the breeding ground of his poetry, since we can only know thoroughly the reality which is very close to us. Indeed, most of his poems are connected with the everyday life of the town where he lived, and some are inspired by his experiences with his patients, since he was a pediatrician and a general practitioner. I call this attachment to the local context for the sake of knowledge of epistemological localism.

Williams sees his peers and the environment he shares with them without idealizing or extolling them, and he speaks to us about them and about himself the way they and he himself speak, managing to transcend the radically concrete, the here and now, through a long and successful stylistic work. Williams, like the Guillén of Cántico, also loved things. Contrary to the tendency of lyric poetry to generalize its subjects and avoid everyday objects, Williams’s poetry approaches them and looks at them with devotion. That is why his poems provoke a sensation of tangible immediacy of enormous liveliness.

Most of Williams’s poetic work is easy

to understand, escapes from the abstract and is made up of poems that are generally short and on many occasions very short. The exception in this respect is his long poem Paterson, more epic than lyrical and lacking the intensity and charm of the rest of his poetry. Williams’s formal experimentation, while surprising, may lack the brilliance of the more accessible Pound and the better Eliot, as well as the elegance of a Wallace Stevens, but his work best expresses the American sensibility and was the first since Whitman who used his speech and his rhythms.

Williams’s originality and specificity also come from his particular way of looking at things, from his first glance and from his “new knowledge of reality.” The influence exerted on him by the work of painters such as Brueghel, Matisse or Duchamp is decisive in this regard. Williams had a pictorial way of looking that he applied from the beginning to many of his poems. The same can be said of his interest in photography, evident in static visuality. Williams himself came to describe his work as “objectivist”.

Williams never indulged in flaunting virtuosity. He did not claim to be the best, on the contrary, to use technique to remove ballast from his compositions, make them more concise and lively, more intense and accessible. The result is a poetry, let’s say, agile, lively, calm and natural. His poems are not perfect works of art, as is the case with Stevens, but instead worked verbal artifacts designed to convey sensations as naturally as possible, with clarity and simplicity of images, and to make the ordinary appear extraordinary. In addition, his sense of rhythm and his good ear are proverbial. Williams remained faithful to free verse to the end. He discarded the traditional English metric of an iambic character, prevailing no less than the Renaissance, and «measured» his lines according to the breath and not to the accent, to the intonation of the speech and not to the classical chant. In a sense, together with Cummings, he completed the metric revolution started by Whitman (who wrote almost exclusively in verse) by extending his predecessor’s findings by applying them to short verse as well. His famous concept of “variable foot” (each “foot” or line is a sustained moment or unit of measure within the unfolding inner perception), although somewhat confusing, seems to give the typographical swing of many of his poems a certain moving painting. In any case, the musicality and visibility of all his compositions clearly show that he wrote his poems always impelled by the convergence of visual and auditory patterns. Sight and hearing: painting with words and hearing things. The senses, not the intellect; sensations, not concepts; things, not ideas; the concrete, not abstractions. Another of his achievements consists in never giving in to the meditative, surrounding, self-absorbed tone. Quite the contrary, Williams looks directly at his peers in their usual scenarios, at the other (and not through or from the other, as occurs with the much-lauded and practiced «objective correlate») and, this is the important thing, not the others. interprets but rather presents them (although it is known that all representation has enough of an interpretation), that is: it does not internalize them, it externalizes them. His poetry is anti-apologetic, it does not need symbols and it opposes any moralizing intention, “conforming” to making its readers see the beauty of reality through its compositions.

Rhyme scheme: aXaXXbaXXbX
Stanza lengths (in strings): 11,
Closest metre: iambic trimeter
Сlosest rhyme: no rhyme
Сlosest stanza type: sonnet
Guessed form: unknown form
Metre: 010101 1101000 010001 0101100 00101 110011 1001 1111 010101 110101010 10101
Amount of stanzas: 1
Average number of symbols per stanza: 278
Average number of words per stanza: 45
Amount of lines: 11
Average number of symbols per line: 24 (strings are less long than medium ones)
Average number of words per line: 4
Mood of the speaker:
The punctuation marks are various. Neither mark predominates.