William Carlos Williams
Not that you need it, considering it is one of the most anthologized and overanalyzed poems in the English Language, but The Guardian walks behind "The Red Wheelbarrow" in their poem of the week.
Reprint Time--Helena
A comment from the blogkeeper at Underbelly (thank you Buce) inspired me to look this up. I was fairly certain that I had reviewed the book in the recent past, and so I discovered this. a good book is worth appreciation--over and over and over again. Also, while you are appreciating, you might want to take in Underbelly's look at Helena as well. La Belle Hélène on March 18, 2005 8:11 AM In reading Helena last night I stumbled across a large number of passages I would like to share. But I thought the more important thing to share was an observation. Evelyn Waugh liked this best among his books. There are a good many reasons why this might be so: it is splendidly written--both the prose and the coherence are several notches above some of his earlier, more frenetic work. It is tightly done, with just the right strokes and exactly the right selection of detail. But I suspect the reason Waugh prized this above all the other works is that in t...
A favorite of mine. I've always seen it as the perfect embodiment of the last lines of Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica."
ReplyDeleteA poem should not mean
But be.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteI like the poem very much, but I can't say much for most of the commentary on it. The poem sufficiently glosses itself and most of the commentary is puffed up and going nowhere. Not the piece I cited. But others. One would think that WCW had invented imagist poetry.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteAgreed--the commentary does get a bit overheated.
It seems almost as if there is a law that says the shorter the poem, the longer the commentary/analysis.