American History

William Carlos Williamss line No ideas  but in things comes from his poem A Sort of a Song (Williams 145).  These five words make up his manifesto of poetry, his philosophy of composition in one enjambed line.  Williamss aim is to deal with real things, not abstractions.  A look at his anthologized work shows that he has, for the most part, been faithful to this ideal.  Williams often presents the reader with an image and then comments on that image with an abstraction or a poetic gloss.  Though maybe it is not completely accurate to say he presents an image.  He tries to bring the reader the thing itself and let it stand for the idea he means to convey.

The most famous example of Williamss ability to present the reader with the thing itself is, of course, The Red Wheelbarrow.  The final three stanzas of the poem, if they can be called stanzas, capture with limpid language the wheelbarrow glazed with rain water    beside the white chickens (56).  The only abstractions or ideas in the poem are suggested by so much depends upon (56).  This vague line is famous for what it fails to say.  It leaves the poetic abstraction outside the poem.  The so much is left for the reader to ponder, and the poem and the poet are not concerned with it (56).  There could be no better example of Williamss dictum No ideas  but in things (145).  But in reading and interpreting the poem, the reader is reminded that it is easy to understand the image, to know intuitively what it means, but the meaning is more difficult.  Class discussions of the poem seem to revolve around the difficulty of pinning down what that so much is.  But what better way to convey the so-muchness of so much than to allow it to remain limitless, and not to explain it

Williamss method of enticing the reader with an image and then leaving an abstraction for the reader to ponder is also on display in Poem.  The poem is twelve short lines that capture, with perfect clarity, a cat climbing over a jamcloset and stepping into an empty flower pot (70).  As he did in The Red Wheelbarrow, Williams slows the reader down with short, enjambed lines broken up into small stanzas.  The poem reads the way the cat walks, ponderously, carefully, and easily.  And this is part of Williamss idea of bringing the thing itself, or in this case the act itself, to the reader.  And once again, the poetic abstraction is only suggested by the poem--it is outside the poem. Poem begins with the preposition as, and the reader is left to wonder who or what the preposition refers to, because that information is not in the poem.  The title of the poem seems to indicate that a poem, or the writing of a poem, occurs as the cat steps over jamcloset, but as could refer to so many things.  As he often does, Williams is asking the reader to consider the possibilities, to keep an open mind when thinking about the abstractions the things of the poem suggest.  Because the questions that his poems seem to ask lack a clear answer, they can be read again and again, and be appreciated by readers of any background.

The meaning of the poem is again pushed away in favor of the thing itself in This Is Just to Say.  If other poets are said to work at a high level of abstraction, Williams is showing how different he is in this poem. The poem ceases to be a poem at all and becomes the thing itself, the apology note. The you who was probably saving the pilfered plums for breakfast is unknown and outside the poem (74).  And in the final stanza recalling the plums that were so sweet  and so cold, the poet is asking the recipient of note to think of the thing itself, and not to worry about abstractions like who is to blame for the missing plums.

The reason for Williamss use of things in place of ideas is stated clearly in A Sort of a Song.  His aim is to reconcile  the people and the stones (145).  But perhaps Williams is guilty of using an abstraction here. This is a poetic way of saying he wants to connect the reader to the world, to bring the world unchanged into his poetry.  Williams has done this, and the world appears as it often does in his poetry mysterious, curious, and full of limitless meaning.