A Study Of William Carlos Williams’s Ekphrastic Poems

William Carlos Williams, pioneer of “pragmatism”, was regarded as one of the greatestpoets in contemporary American poetry. He was far less famous than T. S. Eliot as well asother notable poets, while he surpassed them gradually in his old days. Williams initiated“objective poetry” and made constant attempts in exploration and innovation in poetry. Hetried hard to write in the economy of expressions. The language of his poems is concise,simple and direct. Furthermore, he devoted himself to fusing poetry and painting and makingthem as the same thing. His ekphrastic poetry is apt to arouse readers’aesthetic emotions.Based on the artistic principles as well as views of some artists such as Kandinsky and LiGuanyuan and throughtextualanalysis and comparative study, this thesis aims at exploring theartistic features of Williams’s poems, in which he intensively employed techniques of painting.Color elements and visual forms are stressed in the thesis.Three aspects will be examined to unveil the reasons for the shape of Williams’sekphrastic poems: family members, French Modern Painting trend and his closefriend-painters. In addition, classical Chinese poems have made an impact on him. Then, hispoems are decomposed with a detailed exploration on the basis of theoretical principles onpoetry and painting. The thesis contends that color is the fundamental element in art. Thecontrast of warm and cold colors (by means of hue), light and dark colors (according tobrightness), the targeted colors and the harmonious colors are embodied well in his ekphrasticpoems. His poems look like pictures, which are easy to stimulate readers’ imagination andarise people’s aesthetic senses.Moreover, Williams broke up traditional forms and borrowed similar techniques of visualart to combine both poetry and painting together. Form, especially the spatial form, is thecommon representative of visual art. Williams was good at describing scenes in detail. Thedetailed description of sketch makes the images more vivid and more concrete. He alsoselected the prototype of famous paintings as the poems’images. The images are very closelyrelated to the images in pictures. He insisted on innovating poetic form.Through the study of his ekphrastic poems from the aspect of color and visual form, theprocess of representation of artistic features in Williams’s poetry is also completed. He hasmade a great contribution to poetry.