Stylistic movements in literature and the visual arts being closely related, we often use terminology borrowed from art history to classify or describe aspects of novels or poems. For instance, elements of Romanticism are used to describe Turner’s use of light, colour, atmosphere, and his expression of historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes. Likewise, Romanticism is used to describe Shelley’s extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair in his poetry. These similarities are assumed to be due to  influence on both writers and painters by movements of their period. While we often owe the influence of one painter to another, or one writer to another,  rarely do we attribute debt of influence across these boundaries. However, with regards to other Romantics, Keats made up his Grecian urn, based on viewing the Elgin marbles; Shelley invented his Ozymandias sculpture; Xanadu is largely Coleridge's creation. Romantic poets saw their work as being separate from, and in competition with, other arts. Another movement, Modernism, found a tension between breaking down boundaries between media in order to find new ways to make new art, and upholding distinctions in order to assert value. The technique of ekphrasis breaches these boundaries, and it is there that William Carlos Williams found himself as a modernist.

     William Carlos Williams was a modernist poet, and his creative process owes itself to painting. Experiencing his work is like appreciating a modern painting: "There is no subject; it's what you put on the canvas and how you put it on that makes the difference. Poems aren't made of thoughts — they’re made of words, pigments put on…” Modern painting was immediate, primary, sensual, and sybaritic, and appealed to him more than the secondary intensity of language used as a symbol system. As a poet, he strived to bring these qualities into poetry. In an interview with Walter Sutton, Williams said, "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing." Williams was influenced by experimentation in the visual arts and emulated cubism and photography in focusing on the object itself, delineating it precisely and letting it represent the moment of perception without intrusion and personal comment.

     "The Rose" is an ekphrastic work on a collage by Juan Gris, a cubist, and forces the object, the rose, to occupy many planes of representation. In the collage, the roses are from photographs, cut out from a flower catalogue and pasted. Williams’s poem tries to capture the dynamic quality of Gris’s work, and, like cubism, the image is not fixed on one dramatic focus. Williams begins in the first strophe with a description:

     The rose is obsolete

     but each petal ends in

     an edge, the double facet

     cementing the grooved

     columns of air–The edge

     cuts without cutting

     meets–nothing–renews

     itself in metal or porcelain–

     The poem multiplies frames of perspective, and imagination is free to deconstruct and reconstruct the object. Although the effect of "The Rose" is to separate the image from conventional associations, Williams uses the object in the memory of the perceiver: "the forms common to experience so as not to frighten the onlooker away but to invite him.” Williams employs the visual texture in his language, making hard and fragile materials define the same object, just as Gris cut a photograph of a rose out of a magazine and pasted it on a photograph of a rose painted on a plate. Williams represents this in his second and third strophe:

     But if it ends

     the start is begun

     so that to engage roses

     becomes a geometry–

     Sharper, neater, more cutting

     figured in majolica–

     the broken plate

     glazed with a rose

     "The Rose" most clearly reflects his attention to cubist techniques. Like the cubist painting, the representation is fragmented: opposing varieties of words and statements are juxtaposed without connectives. The poem attempts a geometry of perspective, formed by dualism of perspective and counter-perspective rather than by one series, as reflected in its ending:

     

     The fragility of the flower

     unbruised

     penetrates space

     

     In poems without a central object, a central challenge is maintaining a focus. Williams’s use of breaking down the barriers between the reader and his or her “consciousness of immediate contact with the world” manifests itself in “The rose is obsolete,” in the poem’s shift in focus away from the abstract rose toward the edge of each rose petal.   

     In the multiple perspectives and break-up of the plane of perspective in modern art, Williams found a technique that could liberate poetry, in much the same way the painters had liberated painting from verisimilitude. "Reality,” he says in an interview with the Paris Review. “Reality. My vocabulary was chosen out of the intensity of my concern. When I was talking in front of a group, I wasn't interested in impressing them with my power of speech, but only with the seriousness of my intentions toward them. I had to make them come alive.” His  poems have a visual meaning upon the page: the pattern of the poem's lineation, which becomes a representation of the poem’s meaning. Williams puts a painting into words and shatters the conventional boundaries of literature. He also creates ekphrastic work that doesn’t rely on a narrative and finds its beauty in the cubist perspective, a popular example being his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”. Since the poem is composed of one sentence,  "so much depends upon" each line, and ultimately each word. The form also becomes the poem’s meaning: the image of the wheelbarrow is seen as the actual poem, as in a painting where one sees, the image represents a real object, but as a part of the painting, the image becomes the art. He reveals unique features about his environment by examining the objects, the nouns. Williams, in an interview with The Paris Review, “You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter, than to bother with these [expletive] words. I never actually thought of myself as a poet, but I knew I had to be an artist in some way.”

     Williams's poem "Pot of Flowers," after Demuth's watercolor painting Tuberoses, introduces the dynamism of an image separated from becoming a symbol or natural object. Williams adopted Demuth’s still life and translated it into poetry, using small details to create a drama of its own. Demuth's flowers are vivid and separate from the classical natural scene, occupying the center of an otherwise empty space. Williams, creating ekphrasis from Demuth, fills seemingly “impersonal” objects with visual and emotional motion.

     

     Pink confused with white

     flowers and flowers reversed

     take and spill the shaded flame

     darting it back

     into the lamp’s horn

 

     petals aslant darkened with mauve

 

     red where in whorls

     petal lays its glow upon petal

     round flamegreen throats

 

     petals radiant with transpiercing light

     contending

                  above

     the leaves

     reaching up their modest green

     from the pot’s rim

 

     and there, wholly dark, the pot

     gay with rough moss.

 

     Colors, shapes, and textures tumble and rub against each other, creating the energy, magnitude, and emotion of an epic poem. In the third strophe, light is juxtaposed against a solemn, mysterious darkness. Just like the painting is in muted tones of white and black, the poem creates the same image. The colors take hold of the narrative. By creating these contrasts and using sharp actions, the still life becomes a dramatic scene. Williams writes, “New art does not evade artistic ordering to preserve naturalness, but on the contrary elevates design as a primary end of art.”

     “As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by.  The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it,” Williams wrote in his autobiography (172).

 

     The Great Figure

 

     Among the rain

     and lights

     I saw the figure 5

     in gold

     on a red

     fire truck

     moving

     tense

     unheeded

     to gong clangs

     siren howls

     and wheels rumbling

     through the dark city

 

     This in turn inspired one of Demuth’s most well-known works: “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (Homage to William Carlos Williams)”. In response to William’s poem, Demuth captured the same scene, an ekphrasis on Williams’ poetic description. Williams’s red and gold translates onto Demuth’s painting, as well as the awareness of movement through a dark city street. His decision to use three consecutive gold number fives, each one nested within the other, instills the work with the feeling the fire truck is speeding toward the observer. Demuth does the same with headlights, playing loosely with perspective. Likewise, the alternating bands of gray, white, and black running diagonally across the painting, indeed lends the composition a sense that it is nighttime and raining.

     However, painting isn’t the only medium that parallels William Carlos Williams’s linguistic style. The ability of photography to focus attention on very corporeal, physical objects and the emphasis on their surfaces translates to Williams’s own methods. Williams emulated the focus and isolation of everyday objects. Different angles are the main medium through which a Williams poem moves, not time nor narrative. New lines present autonomous perspective, each lasting as long as a camera's shutter-speed. Each line's content is limited to what can be quickly seen: identifications, colors, shapes, the effects of light, the middle of a verb. Williams avoids adjectives and adverbs, which have no direct impact. Williams's photographic poem, then, captures the objectness of  photography by building a diction of nouns, the part of speech that most stress an object's mere being. The image is not embellished, and there is no intellectual rhetoric instructing the reader how to perceive this image.

     William Carlos Williams ultimately found his poetic voice through ekphrasis. He was an expert translator between the arts, from the visual to the word. His imagist principles and the serious thrust of Williams's "no ideas but in things," as well as his view of the poem as "a machine made out of words” enabled him to use painting as a focus-lense for his poetry. Like the modernist movement in the writing world, the visual arts was transforming with the emergence of cubism and photography. It was the deliberate combination of these two “revolutions” that brought William Carlos Williams into his own. By delineating the poem precisely (and the noun it stood for) and letting it stand for itself, without narrative comment, Williams distinguished himself as a modernist.  Williams once said on writing: “Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination.”

 

WORKS CITED:

 

Beach, Christopher.  “William Carlos Williams and the Modernist American Scene.”  The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge UP, 2003.

 

Poetry Foundation.  “Archive: William Carlos Williams (1883-1963).”  2007. 15 December 2014.

 

Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.

 

Wrede, Theda. "A New Beginning: William Carlos Williams's Cubist Technique in Spring and All." Interdisciplinary Humanities 22.2 (2005): 35. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Dec. 2014.