William Carlos Williams: Free the Poetry!
Williams does away with traditional poetic structure in order to free the actual poetry inherent in the sounds and meanings of words. In his poetry, he offers a lesson in aesthetics regarding how to engage his poetry as a way of looking at reality. At the literal level, his poetry speaks self-reflexively about its significance: "It is hard to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." His poetry attempts to re-engage people in reality. As he contends: "Anything is good material for poetry. Anything"(Paterson V). This belief is evidenced in a passage from "Two pendants: for the Ears":
2 partridges
2 Mallard ducks
a Dungeness crab
24 hours out
of the Pacific
and 2 live-frozen
trout
from Denmark.
He turns a fashionable grocery list into poetry by arranging the words upon the page in a manner allowing for poetic rhythm to emerge (Weatherhead 108). Rather than creating poetry according to the conventional choosing of images and creating analogies between them, his primary focus is the arrangement of words to create rhythm.
In "The Red Wheelbarrow," Williams takes familiar images but rearranges them in a way that differently emphasizes their meanings through rhythm. He does this by breaking apart certain phrases which conventionally flow together in one's mind: "depends" is broken away from "upon," "wheel" is separated from "barrow," "rain" divided from "water," and "white" is disjoined from "chickens." By altering the rhythm through divergent arrangement of words upon the page, Williams creates a new context through which to view and absorb familiar images (Koch 50). This re-birth of the ability to newly engage old images structurally serves the significant poetic function (that the literal line about men dying miserably every day for lack of what is found in poetry does) to remind us of poetry's value in connecting us with reality. His shifting poetic structure forces the reader to engage his images freshly.
Williams further instructs the reader in how to view his poems in one entitled "To a Solitary Discipline":
Rather notice, mon cher,
that the moon is
tilted above
the point of the steeple
than that its color
is shell-pink.
Rather observe
... ... middle of paper ... ... Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays.
When he first meets Daisy, Gatsby becomes infatuated with his idea of her, or rather, the false persona that she creates of herself. In fact, Gatsby reveals that “she was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known” (155). Gatsby was so impressed with Daisy mainly because of her wealth and her status; it is what he wants. However, Daisy chooses Tom Buchanan over Gatsby, solely because of his social status. As a result, Gatsby revolves his whole life around her: he becomes wealthy, creates a new image of himself, and buys a house across the bay from Daisy. For instance, he fabricates lies about how “ [he is] the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west” (69) and how “ [he] was brought up in America but educated at Oxford” (69) in order to impress her. These lies end up altering others’ perspectives of him - not necessarily in a positive way - and impacting his life as a whole. Daisy unwittingly transforms Gatsby into a picture-perfect image of the 1920s: lavish parties, showy cars, and a false illusion of the attainment of the American Dream. Despite Gatsby’s newfound wealth and success, he never fully accomplishes his dream: to get Daisy. Gatsby’s final act for the sake of Daisy has no impact on her feelings towards him. When Gatsby claims that he crashed into Myrtle and killed her, Daisy carelessly lets him do so, which ultimately results in his death. To make
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald focuses on the lifestyle of a group of people who will do anything to accomplish their goals. The characters go through different changes that come to affect their life decisions and will cause them to lie, sacrifice and feel lonely in their lives. They live the American dream and have power but chase a dream that would affect and change their lifestyles. They judge and discriminate against one another not knowing they have a certain symbol in common in their lives. Their desire to accomplish their goals became a type of new life to the characters.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
film music. On the one side there are the purists, who cry foul at the piecing together of
My second example is Gatsby. There could not be a better example of someone who has lived a life that is a total opposite to American dream. How did he become rich? He was a bootlegger. He got his money illegally. What did he concentrate on for the past 5 years? He arranged parties and gatherings to try to get close to the only thing that gave him a meaning to live: Daisy. Was he ever happy during that time? I highly doubt it. He had fun, bootlegging and making money and getting together with lots of so called 'friends.'; All just to get close to Daisy. Did he even succeed in winning her? No, and that's the point. He was unsatisfied with life and in the end, someone had killed him.
Nick (narrator the story) admires this quality in Gatsby and excuses all his faults because of his hopes and dreams. In the end, Gatsby dies in pursuit of his dreams and Nick says, “No – Gatsby turned out alright at the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams.”
At a first glance, The Great Gatsby is an account of a failed relationship between a man from a modest background and a woman from high society. This aspect of the novel however also serves to develop a much bigger theme. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is a story about the value of the so called American Dream and the polarity between its particular ideas. Fitzgerald uses many different means to express a certain perspective on the subject. The most significant articulation of this theme is reflected in Jay Gatsby's tremendous quest for the woman he loves, which is punctuated by a conflict between his idealised vision of his love and the actual conditions. This is a repeating pattern. The novel is punctured by many
Wealth, material possessions, and power are the core principles of The American Dream. Pursuit of a better life led countless numbers of foreign immigrants to America desiring their chance at the vast opportunity. Reaching the American Dream is not always reaching true happiness. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby achieves the American Dream, but his unrealistic faiths in money and life’s possibilities twist his dreams and life into useless life based on lies.
One particularly useful cross-disciplinary element employed in concrete poetry is the use of space. The poetry of Emmett Williams, Seiichi Nikuni, and Ilse and Pierre Garnier in particular, make use of spatial relationships in their poetry. The use of space can be employed in place of traditional grammar and syntax to convey meaning in concrete poetry, particularly when the spatial position of one element is taken into consideration with other elements of the poem. Another element that may arise from these spatial relationships is a temporal aspect that all poetry employs, but which becomes uniquely meaningful in the context of the concrete poetry of the twentieth century. Without these relationships concrete poems may appear as crude distortions of words on a page, with no significant sense or meaning to communicate. Therefore, the temporal/spatial relationships between poetic elements become necessary tools which the reader needs in order to fully understand the linguistically driven meaning behind many concrete poems.
On one level The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald comments on the careless gaiety and moral decadence of the period in which it was set. It contains innumerable references to the contemporary scene. The wild extravagance of Gatsby's parties, the shallowness and aimlessness of the guests and the hint of Gatsby's involvement in crime all identify the period and the American setting. But as a piece of social commentary The Great Gatsby also describes the failure of the American dream, from the point of view that American political ideals conflict with the actual social conditions that exist. For whereas American democracy is based on the idea of equality among people, the truth is that social discrimination still exists and the divisions among the classes cannot be overcome. Myrtle's attempt to break into the group to which the Buchanans belong is doomed to fail. Taking advantage of her vivacity, her lively nature, she seeks to escape from her own class. She enters into an affair with Tom and takes on his way of living. But she only becomes vulgar and corrupt like the rich. She scorns people from her own class and loses all sense of morality. And for all her social ambition, Myrtle never succeeds in her attempt to find a place for herself in Tom's class. When it comes to a crisis, the rich stand together against all outsiders.
...be who they want to be. Tom is completely different around Myrtle and Daisy. He knows he can be more dominant around Myrtle since she is poor. He knows he cannot be that way towards Daisy since she comes from money herself. The idea of the American dream is totally destroyed in The Great Gatsby because of the way the characters interact in the story.
In "The Great Gatsby," Tom is one of the most enigmatic, vivid and compelling characters. He openly broaches his racism, temperament and sexism as if he has no apprehension in the world. However, there is much more to his character than it seems. Tom uses his bulkiness and husky voice to mask his loneliness in order to escape reality. His loneliness can be seen through his constant venery of women, inability to settle down in one location and through his fear of losing control. Escaping reality, however, is only temporary and his pusillanimity to face his true self throughout the course of the novel catches up to him in the end.
...eme” (Spring and All 179). It is not enough to accept Williams’s words in Spring and All as a sound argument for the direction of poetry or as a proper list of what poetry shouldn’t be. One must examine the work as a reactionary piece to the issues of the time period it was written in while insuring that it carries along the ideals it intends to redefine, without question.
The point was that Williams is trying to imagine an autonomous work of art that has a deep thinking to it, that is in some sense violence or personified, and this sexual desire to make the tragic something living, introduces to the world of the tragic the problem of death. Tennessee William explores a conflict through between desire and death. There ...