1.1 Introduction to William Carlos Williams and His Imagist Poems
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, closely associated with Modernism and Imagism. Williams was also a physician with his own practice and he worked as one for all his life in America. He met Ezra Pound when he entered the University of Pennsylvania and they became friends. Pound introduced Williams to the Imagist Movement and encouraged him to write poetry. However, he did not agree with Pound’s broken multi-cultural style. Williams’ major difference with Pound lay in his belief that “localism alone can lead to culture” (Chang, 2008:189) and American poetry must be rooted in America. In the 1930s-40s, Williams was not as famous
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The first part will focus on Pound’s poetic principle of Imagism “Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.” (Pound, 1918:3) It will introduce the Imagist Movement, Pound’s definition of “Image” and how does Williams develop his own way of presenting images on the basis of Pound’s.
The second part will be mainly about Pound’s second and third principles of Imagism: the economy of words and the forms of free verse. Williams’ famous Imagist poem “This Is Just to Say” will be analyzed by its language and its form. The third part will focus on how to make sense of Imagist poems. There will be a close reading of Williams work “This Is Just to Say”, and a discussion of how Imagist poems provide their readers with an aesthetic pleasure and a sense of openness for interpretation. The significance of this thesis lies in the analysis of one of Williams’ Imagist poems, This is Just to Say, with Ezra Pound’s poetic principles of Imagism. Influenced by Pound, although it is just a short phase in Williams’ literary career, Williams’ imagist poems are the beginning of his experimentation into modernism, and they represent his famous dictum “no ideas but in