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William Carlos Williams
"Burning the Christmas Greens" was written in 1944, in the shadow of World War II, but likely hearkens back to another Christmas Day: December 25, 1918, the date of Williams's father's death. The...
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William Carlos Williams
How does this poem embody the themes of ritual and regeneration? “Burning the Christmas Greens” describes a seasonal ritual: the taking down and burning of greenery used as decoration during the...
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William Carlos Williams
In the poem “Burning the Christmas Greens,” William Carlos Williams recalls the post-Christmas ritual of collecting and burning discarded trees whose “time past.” The poet makes an occasion that...
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William Carlos Williams
In these two examples, Williams writes in the sparse style of the Modernist, conveying an image and leaving the interpretation open to his readers. In "The Red Wheelbarrow," point out to...
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William Carlos Williams
Twentieth-century poets who wrote in the Minimalist style, such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, expressed their thoughts in as succinct and concise a manner as possible, while at the...
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William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is what a piece of ekphrastic literature, meaning that it is based on a work of art. The poem, like Auden's more famous poem "The Musee...
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William Carlos Williams
In "The Yachts," Williams uses a vivid metaphor to describe the sea in which the yacht race takes place. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to something to which...
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William Carlos Williams
"No ideas but in things" was an Imagist philosophy that embraced the idea of written expression in clear, sharp, minimal words, and Williams' poem exemplifies this philosophy very well. "The Red...
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William Carlos Williams
The tone of this poem is lighthearted. This short, three-stanza imagist poem is actually a note the poet has written to someone he is close to, apologizing for eating the plums she has saved. The...
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William Carlos Williams
"Raleigh Was Right" was William Carlos Williams's response to a poetic duel between Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh that took place in the late sixteenth century. Marlowe had written...
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William Carlos Williams
Certainly, at first glance, the poetry of William Carlos Williams seems to be very curious. In fact, when he first started writing poems like "This Is Just to Say," nobody took him seriously....
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William Carlos Williams
You're absolutely right in saying that the speaker in William Carlos Williams' short story "Verbal Transcription -- 6 AM" is "talking about so many ordinary life matters." If you consider what...
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William Carlos Williams
Williams' poem is meant to evoke a famous painting, Pieter Breugel the Elder's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The painting in turn refers to the mythic story of Icarus, who, using a set of...
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William Carlos Williams
In the 1930's William Carlos Williams used the expression The Term to describe a literary movement in poetry where poems could be analyzed as objects in and of themselves to reveal truth. It is...
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William Carlos Williams
Several poets have written about this well-known painting by Pieter Bruegel, including Auden. What makes the painting so interesting is that Icarus, the putative subject, falls from the sky in the...
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William Carlos Williams
First of all, Williams' poem is rather short; it only has twenty-eight words in it. It just doesn't read like a typical, traditional poem to some people. In fact, it reads more like an apology...
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William Carlos Williams
Nature poetry down through the ages, from the Greeks and early oriental poets, up through the pastoral (shepherd) poetry of the Romantics, to modern-day paeans to Nature, treated Nature as...
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William Carlos Williams
'The Doctor Stories' is an interesting collection of a physician's thoughts: not only does it speak to art/the language of stories but it also includes many parallels and interdisciplinary...
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William Carlos Williams
Defamiliarization is the poetic process of taking ordinary objects and using them in a poem in such a way that the reader sees them as new or different. Williams often used common things in his...
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William Carlos Williams
These poems all share Williams’ short-line, unrhymed cadenced, almost shorthand imagery. “Wheelbarrow,” the most often anthologized of these three poems, suggests the typical farmyard setting but...
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William Carlos Williams
American poetry of the nineteenth century was, in style, verse form, and subject matter, basically an import from England and the rest of Europe—until Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, there was no...
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William Carlos Williams
Williams’ poetry is distinctive in several ways – its “American” voice, its unrhymed short line broken into phrases, and especially in the way he uses metaphors, never obvious or clichéd, but...
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William Carlos Williams
The key device used by the poet in this poem is personification; he describes the flower Queen Anne's Lace as if it were a lover, combining the literal (the plant is powerful, "taking / the field...
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William Carlos Williams
The early twentieth century in America (and in all the Western world) was a transition time for art and literature; the release from the traditions of Victorianism manifested itself in all kinds of...