Poetry for Young People by William Carlos Williams

They also noticed that each stanza contained four words (how had I missed that detail?). When my first grade students studied the text of the poem, they immediately noticed that there were four stanzas (awareness built of studying a poem each week). Today we read 16 Words: William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Lisa Rogers and learned about a poem made up of a mere 16 words. The poem starts by wasting no time.I love short form poetry, especially when working with young children. He lived right in the middle of an industrial landscape and, like his friends the painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, he saw a strange beauty and great potential in such material for his art. He didn’t think it was necessary to revisit Greek mythology for his themes or to rhapsodise about exotic landscapes with nightingales to give ‘atmosphere’. He wanted to make poetry out of the particular, everyday circumstances in which he lived as a husband, father and doctor in Rutherford. In fact, however, Williams had a different agenda. It’s no wonder that many readers thought at first that Williams was ‘putting them on’, that he was satirising poetry as it had been previously understood. For those brought up on Keats or Wordsworth (or even Pope and Swift) ‘This Is Just To Say’ seems to be a catalogue of absences: no rhyme, no meter, no ‘beautiful vocabulary’, no sense of transcendence, no ‘poetic’ landscape - not even the attack on society’s shortcomings we might have had from Pope or Swift. By the end of his life, in 1963, he would be the recipient of many honours and remain an important influence on American poetry (and on poetry in English generally) for decades afterwards.Īt a distance now of seventy years it is interesting to consider just exactly what makes these 28 words a ‘poem’.

At that time, already in his fifties, William Carlos Williams, fulltime doctor and energetic poet of Rutherford, New Jersey, was just beginning to emerge from the obscurity to which his ‘anti-poetic’ style had condemned him. This famous, some would say infamous, poem was first published in the mid-1930s. This is Just to Say – with a critique by Geoff PageĪ Critique of “This is Just to Say” by Geoff Page

Poetry for Young People by William Carlos Williams