4.10: Wiliam Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is Just to Say"

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Directions

Here, you will find Wiliam Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This is Just to Say"

The poems are on a docx. file. I recommend either printing it our or annotating the digital copy on your computer, or taking notes on the story on a separate piece of paper.

Author's Bio:

Affectionately known as “the good doctor,” the prolific William Carlos Williams published dozens of works of literature in his lifetime, including novels, plays, essay and poetry collections, an autobiography, and one of the longest modernist poems ever composed, the five-part epic Paterson. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, Williams attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met fellow poets Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) and Ezra Pound. Soon after graduating, Williams settled back home in Rutherford with his wife and family to run a medical practice, delivering over 2000 babies during his lifelong career as a pediatrician.

Stylistically, Williams’s poetry is rooted in the Imagism championed by his friend Ezra Pound, as evidenced by the short imagist poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” presented here. In his Autobiography, Williams writes that the poet is “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 insistence on writing about the particular led him to differ from poets such as Pound and Eliot, who eventually sought to make modern poetry more universal by making it moreinternational, infusing it with different cultures and languages. Williams chose instead to write most of his poems to use the title of one of his essay collections “in the American grain,” finding the universal in the everyday experiences of his native land. In “This Is Just To Say,” Williams combines the linguistic economy of an Imagist poet with the shifts in perspective of a Cubist painter, presenting multiple perspectives on a small family drama over the course of three brief stanzas.

While reading the poem, keep these questions/ideas in mind:

While reading this poem, reflect on what type of theme or message that jumps out to you?
List the themes
Then, begin to note and list the different use of poetic and literary devices in the poem
What about these devices makes you feel this way?
What does the poem mean to you??
This poem is what scholars calls Imagism, for its short, but image-like quality. It is almost supposed to be a photograph and information. What do you think about this style choice?
Did you like the poem? Why or why not?

Essay Topic

As a reminder, your essay topic is:

Do a close read of the poem. What is one overall theme/message that you see in the text? What are the literary/poetic devices that you see that are enhancing said theme/message?

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