On The Visual Characteristics In William Carlos Williams's Poetry

William Carlos Williams is viewed as one of the greatest poets in modern American poetry. Williams lived long in the shadow of T. S. Eliot although they both were contemporaries. Until after World War II, especially the last decade of his life, as Eliot's influence began to wane, Williams was elevated in the public mind to role of a great poet. Critics in the West began to show their increasing interest in Williams and his works ever since, and there has been a lot of criticism on him, on his works, on his language of clarity and conciseness, and on simple and vivid images in his poetry. However, there is comparatively less exploration of the critical study of the painterly features and the visual artistic effects achieved in Williams's poetry. The present thesis attempts to provide a relatively thorough study of this neglected dimension.A large space of the thesis is devoted to a thorough exploration and interpretation of the visual characteristics in Williams's poetry. Through the textual analysis of some of his poems, and with the guidance of the artistic theories and views of some artists like Kandinsky, the author of the thesis tries to interpret how Williams ingeniously adopts the painterly devices - color element, technique of perspective and the arrangement of poetic lines. Williams stresses the visual artistic effects in his poetry. The following poems by Williams will be analyzed in the thesis: "The Great Figure," "The Disputants," "Between Walls," "Nantucket," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "Young Sycamore," "Primrose," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," "The Wildflower," "The Young Woman at a Window," "The Yellow Chimney," "The Locust Tree in Flower," and "The Waitress."Williams devotes all his life to unflagging exploration and innovation of poetic form. Many of his poems are apt to create visual pictures in the readers' mind. These painterly characteristics, which should not be neglected, are principally attributable to his painting complex. First of all, since his childhood, Williams wasgreatly influenced by his mother, who had a great artistic talent and once studied art in Paris, and used to fill his ears with stories of art, of Paris and of painters. Secondly, Williams had a special liking for painting and was an amateur painter himself. He kept contact with many European and American painters, such as Duchamp, Gris and Demuth, etc., and maintained lasting friendship with some of them throughout his life. In addition, he frequently involved himself in the salons of the New York avant-garde artists, and regularly visited galleries and art exhibitions. He benefited greatly and gained inspiration from avant-garde movements in the modern Western visual arts, such as Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism.One of the most notable features in Williams's poetry is that he extensively employs expressions of color. In his poetry, instead of employing vague and abstract expressions, Williams originally adopts painterly devices and techniques (e.g. contrast of color, the harmony of color) to accomplish the transformation from the linear progression of reading words into visual pictures of daily-life scenes with united and harmonious colors. Being visually stimulated, the readers have wild imagination and sympathy when reading.Furthermore, Williams, in his poetry, attempts to adopt the painterly technique of the eye's linear movement downward, upward and inward, which produces a feeling of visual movement, so as to embody a succession in space and time. He usually has minute delineation on an object by means of successive segments of a picture plane. Every picture plane is to provide a supplement to the previous one, and meanwhile depends on the supplement of the subsequent one. What Williams intends to convey is in the picture plane as a whole. Williams makes use of the technique of the eye's linear movement with great expressiveness in his poems in order to break through the temporal-spatial limit, to make the static object dynamic and the dynamic one static, to embody a sense of time and space, which is...