William Carlos Williams wrote a poem called The Wheelbarrow. This poem is about a wheelbarrow. He also wrote a poem titled This Is Just to Say. This poem is about Williams eating someone’s plums that he had found in their icebox. That’s it. That’s all that there is to them. They’re poems about wheelbarrows and plums. They do not serve a further purpose. There is no theme. Both poems don’t have much to do with ‘The Modern Man’ which was a pretty popular theme in the modern-ish period, no? No. Not to William Carlos Williams.
“Williams poems are just a statement of fact,” I thought. I’ve come to realize that they are, and they’re not. His poems served a purpose, and that purpose was to celebrate the ordinary, the concrete, and the simple. Imagine using ornate language to celebrate how nice a wheelbarrow happened to look. It defeats the purpose.
But what did I know about poetry? How many people in the past century defined and redefined poetry? How many people defined it in a way that serves their own agenda (aka Horace)? Who said that poetry should be made up of flowery/ ornate VS crisp/ concrete language? How much of anyone’s ideas actually stuck?
The only thing I do know about poetry is that it’s for everyone and for everything, and that it suits every occasion. Poetry could be for the heartbroken and the in love; the go-getters and the lazy. Poetry could celebrate the ordinary and the cosmic order of things. It could show us ugly social and political institutions. Or it could make us see ourselves for what we truly are —and a lot of the time that scares us.
So poetry is everything you want it to be, and everything you don’t. It’s high snobeity (this is not a word), ornate lingo, and normal, everyday stuff. It’s William Blake telling us about the children with robbed childhoods, it’s Elizabeth Browning telling us about how much she loved her husband in 40-something Petrarchan-style sonnets—and it’s William Carlos Williams telling us about the plums and the wheelbarrow.
So, I’m sorry I ever thought I could put chains on the freest form of art I know. I’m sorry I thought there was such a thing as right poetry, which is ridiculous.
