Is this one of the great poems of the 20th Century?

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

I will not play tug of war.
I will only play hug of war.
Where everyone hugs instead of tugs.
Everyone giggles & roles in the rugs.
Everyone laughs & everyone grins.
Everyone kisses & everyone wins.

I remember doing Homework for the local fine arts festival thing.
Duckie

The Cremation of Sam McGee!

Rest and look at this goddamned wheelbarrow. Whatever
It is. Dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
For their significance.
For their significant. For being human
The signs escape you. You, who aren't very bright
Are a signal for them. Not,
I mean, the dogs and crocodiles, sunlamps. Not
Their significance.

There is beauty in simplicity and simplicity in art can be difficult to accomplish.

of course, I just like William Carlos Williams. This poem is just cited to death...so much more to his work than this small poem, yet it's the one everyone remembers : )

You must see something more than just simplicity in this. One of the great poems of the 20th century? Can you say why you think so?

I like the poem, I just get the feeling that some people see a lot more to it than I do.

Just me and one other student. We were the only ones on the onto-gradschool, english department track. We used to basically run that particular course while the professor dozed.

I came down, yes. But I am, deep down, an Imagist. And his point is so apt in the context of the confessorial, ego-centric poetry of the mid-twentieth centurty (take Sylvia Plath, please!). If you can't make it work with just a perfect apt image in perfect language, then you can forget all the rest of the hyperventilating that constitutes way too much of 20th century poetry.



It is not, however, the best or most important poem of the 20th Century. My personal favorite is Steven's Sunday Morning. And if you have to go to Important, you're probably want to look at Stevens as well, because of his highly developed views on poetics and art.

And the WCW poem is like a little imagist Sunday Morning. It's not just a picture of the visual richness all around us -- it's a statement that those images, and what they mean to our lives, are supremely important.

As Wallace Stevens wrote:

There is not any haunt of prophecy
Nor any old chimera of the grave

...that has endured

As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

because it says so much with so little. Probably Steven's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird would be one of my picks.

the red winged black bird croaks frog-like though more shrill as the beads of his eyes blaze over the swamp and the odors of the swamp vodka to his nostrils


I don't how he broke it up though

but here is another short Williams

SHORT POEM

You slapped my face
oh but so gently
I smiled
at the caress.
Copyright 1963 by the estate of WCW.

and Emily

1212

A word is dead
when it is said,
Some say.
I say it just
Begins to live
that day.

I've never heard of it, or him; I looked him up, and the first of his other poems that I found (Transitional) is better - more meaningful, and less pretentious (putting barrow on a seperate line from wheel is frankly childish).

I've heard hundreds of song lyrics better than this; to compare this to all the great poems of the last centruy is ludicrous.

as others have said, others are just as great or greater. "Waste Land" is one of these, as are "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" by Wallace Stevens, "Tender Buttons" by Gertrude Stein, "The Cantos" by Pound, "The Second Coming" or "Leda and the Swan" by Yeats and a few others I cannot think of right now. All in all, give me Stevens.

edit: Spelling. Why don't I do spell check?

starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York.

...... Howl, Alan Ginsberg

thanks

of a row of Virginia Military Institute cadets all holding their copy of Howl in literature class.

Man, to be a fly on the wall for the following discussion.

Call me nostalgic, but I always held a particular affection for this poem.

Cut the Mullet--Wesley Wills

Do something about your long, filthy hair
It looks like a rat's nest
Do something about your mullet
Get out the hair clippers, jerk

Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet

Get the rat's nest off your head
Get that crazy-ass mother off your skull
Take your ass to the barber shop
Tell the barber that you're sick of looking like an asshole

Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet

The mullet is the reason why people hate you
They are sick of looking at your nappy weed-sack
Nobody wants to look at you with that mullet on your head
Why don't you cut that mullet, you numbskull

Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet
Cut the mullet

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