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"NO IDEAS BUT IN THINGS": WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS' OBJECTIVIST POETRY

Journal Name:

  • İstanbul Üniversitesi LITERA, Journal of Western Languages and Literatures

Publication Year:

  • 2009
Author NameUniversity of AuthorFaculty of Author
Abstract (2. Language): 
The present paper aims to define and discuss the main features of William Carlos Williams' objectivist poetry relating them to Imagism and the modernist movements in visual arts which are envisioned as the movement's major intellectual precursors. Williams is likewise situated within the larger frame of Objective poetry to spot the unique aspects of his philosophy which separate him from other representatives of the movement and which turn him into an influential force in the formulation of the Pound-Williams-Olson lineage in American Poetry. These theoretical formulations are supplied with the analyses of several representative poems: "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Between Walls," "The Term" and "Proletarian Portrait." Let... the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. — through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things)... — W.C. Williams, "A Sort of a Song" And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. V. Shklovsky The roots of letters are things. H. D. Thoreau Gaining its essence from Ezra Pound's Imagist principles and the radical innovations launched into the field of visual arts in the beginning the 20th century, Objectivism functioned as a buffer zone between the modernist aesthetics of Imagism and the Projectivist school heralded by Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" in 1950s. As a major representative of the movement,
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  • 2
31-54
  • English

REFERENCES

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