Posted on March 5th, 2007 at 9:33 pm by honoka and
Biography
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He started to write poetry when he was in Horace Mann High School. He decided to be a doctor and writer at Horace Mann High School. He met Ezra Pound in University of Pennsylvania who became a great influence in Williams’ writing. Where he continued his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. He invented fressh and singularly American poetry, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday life and the lives of common people. He invented this fresh American poetry, because he felt Pound was too attached to European culture and traditions. He had heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.
Poem:
Landscape With The Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
What I like
I like this poem because it sounds like William Carlos Williams is trying to tell story about Icarus. It didn’t sound like poetry to me, but still, it was fun to read this poem.
What I don’t like
I didn’t like the way he separates words and phrases. Sometimes it is just a word, sometimes phrase that continues to next line and that confused me.
Questions
- Why did William Carlos Williams chose to form poem this way?
- Why did he write about Icarus falling?
- Why did he had a part that farmer ploughing his field?
Figurative languages
Onomatopoeia - tingling
Personification - the edge of the sea concerned with itself
Stanza - triplet
