William Carlos Williams: Craft Annotation The poet William Carlos Williams stands apart as one of the most influential poets of modern times. Williams' poetic voice composes a unique picture in which the reader is immersed in the poet's world of sensory perception. Williams believed that everything in our lives, no matter how simple, can be organized into poetic verse. Through Williams' rather simplistic straightforward language and observations he speaks directly to ordinary individuals. Williams' poetry utilizes objectivism to craft the poem into an object and to emphasize the action of perception. The poems, "Poem," "The Great Figure," and "Spring and All" are each representative of Williams' ability to craft language and imagery into
This simple description draws the reader into a moment of objectivist perception. The poem increases in pace as it progresses, mimicking the motion of the rumbling fire truck. Williams primarily uses visual perception to shape his poems, but in "The Great Figure," he harnesses the additional sense of sound to draw the reader into the role of observer. The lines, "to gong clangs," "siren howls," and "wheels rumbling" are all blunt but detailed descriptions that are able to engage the auditory sense of the reader. Finally, the poem concludes with an end-stopped line. The punctuation at the end of "The Great Figure" creates the appearance of the poem as a continuous sentence or idea. In this instance, Williams crafts the action of the poem to follow the observation of movement and sound echoing through the night. Williams crafts his poetry in order to emphasize the perception of objects. He focuses on engagement of the senses, as opposed to crafting a poem based on rhetoric. Williams' poem are not argumentative instead they place the reader in the objectivist perspective, and often there is no clear resolution at the conclusion of a poem. In "Spring and All," Williams directs the reader's attention from the cold bleakness of winter to the reawakening of the natural world in spring. The form of the poem follows the progression of time as the world of the poem is in a state of transition. The first stanza contains words ending in mute sounds, for