Billie Dee's Poetry Anthology: William Carlos Williams

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Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963) was a physician who practiced in suburban Rutherford, New Jersey. His strong, lean writing evolved out of the Imagist movement and was strongly influenced by the avant guarde Dada and Cubist schools of painting. His use of the ordinary and personal imagery of everyday life has served as a model for many contemporary American poets.

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The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

This is Just to Say (1938)

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

Spring and All (1922)

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken