William Carlos Williams

It's not often that I'll read a collection of poetry, but I've done that recently with William Carlos Williams's Red Wheelbarrow. Part of my interest in Williams stems from the simplicity of his most famous poems, among them the titular poem in this collection as well as 'This is Just to Say.' These poems resonate as a result of their ease, their clarity. There are several other poems in the collection, including 'The Term,' which achieve something similar: insight into the familiar, delivered intelligibly. The cleanliness of Williams's poems -- because that's really what I think it is, a sort of hygiene -- is one thing which sets them apart, and which has helped secure his place, I gather, in American letters. I don't know that this is my favorite set of poems, and some of them certainly, I think, wander off course, but reading it was refreshing: there's very little pretense here; the words largely exist as they are written. This, in itself, is reason for celebration. The last word is reserved for Williams: "And no whiteness is so white as the memory of whiteness."