Poems by William Carlos Williams?

Question

Poems by William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was a medical doctor by profession. He was half Caucasian and half Puerto Rican. He was close friends with another important American poet from the early part of the 1900’s whom we will not read, Ezra Pound. I’ll leave you one of Pound’s poems, which happens to be the shortest poem I’ve every seen:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. – By Ezra Pound

At the Ball Game
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —
all the exciting detail
of the chase
and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —
all to no end save beauty
the eternal -
So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful
for this
to be warned against
saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous
it smiles grimly
its words cut —
The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —
The Jew gets it straight - it
is deadly, terrifying —
It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution
It is beauty itself
that lives
day by day in them
idly —
This is
the power of their faces
It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is
cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail
permanently, seriously
without thought
Response: What are the positives and the negatives about a crowd? One paragraph in length. Think about what he says with regards to the “flashy female” and “the Jew.” The crowd is both beautiful and venomous, why?
The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turned away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
Response: What does spring represent (think symbolism) in this poem? Why is the speaker (the widow) reacting differently to spring in this particular poem than she has in the past? One paragraph.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Response: This poem describes a scene, except for the very opening of the poem: “so much depends upon. . .” What depends upon this red wheelbarrow? This poem is striking for its simplicity, but much has been written about it with regards to this opening. Write a paragraph analyzing the significance of a wheelbarrow.

Answer 1

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How is this Philosophy? Sounds like Literature class to me.

Also, please do your own homework.