William Carlos Williams vs. T.S. Eliot

Although William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot are quite different in their authorial roles, there are some striking similarities in their poetry. T. S. Eliot, especially in The Wasteland, evokes a complicated and layered world peopled by the diminishing presence of humanity and the rising power of industrialized consumerism. William Carlos Williams, on the other hand, especially in “The Red Wheelbarrow”, provides a stark, simple, almost pastoral rural scene - a snapshot of someplace.

Working through The Wasteland the vignettes pop viscerally into view and become almost tangible, inhabited by the reader. In a few simple lines, “The Red Wheelbarrow” fills the frame with a still-life of “a red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/chickens” which is now so large as to command our attention (Williams 294-295). Elevating the everyday is an aspect of modernism that William Carlos Williams exemplifies in all his poetry.

William Carlos Williams can’t really move away too far from what T.S. Eliot began, because to do so would require the author to lay out his own emotions and perspectives on the scene he created. Yet this layering of the author’s emotion, even if subdued or minimal, would put just enough of a barrier or buffer between the reader and the image as to move the poem out of the realm of the imagistic that he was attempting to create. William Carlos Williams did not go along with T. S. Eliot’s classical allusions and formalistic structure, but he did follow Eliot’s preference for the universal essence of the image.


A red wheelbarrow

In an article titled "The Progression of William Carlos Williams' Use of Imagery", Hyun-Young Cho discusses William Carlos Williams’ use of imagery in his poetry and he suggests that although Williams begins (in his earlier poems like “The Red Wheelbarrow”) with a studied lack of emotion and authorial presence, as he moved into his later pieces Williams let down some of those structural defenses and infused his longer poems with a great deal of his own emotions. “Gradually, the speaker’s narration began to dominate his long prose-like poems written during the 1940s-’50s. “The Sparrow” reflects this radical progression Williams went through as a poet.” (Cho). What happens in the later poems is that rather than forcing the reader to confront the text alone and mediate the images for himself, the reader must also deal with the presence of the narrator’s voice, perspective and opinion as part of the whole.

This layer moves the image into a more emotional realm, something that “The Red Wheelbarrow” tried very hard to avoid.This is similar to Eliot’s narrative voice which shows through in The Wasteland as he faces adversity in his personal life. His marriage was very troubled at the time he wrote The Wasteland, and his wife was committed to an asylum. In addition to marital struggles, Eliot was dealing with the death of his father as well as the death of a close friend of his, Jean Verdenal, in World War I. Also, Eliot had “passed his thirtieth year” and some view The Waste Land as a “memorial to his youth” (Norton 461).

Works Cited:
Cho, Hyun-Young (2003). "The Progression of William Carlos Williams’ Use of Imagery" (PDF). Writing for a Real World 4: 62–69. http://www.usfca.edu/rhetcomp/journal/cho2003.pdf.

Ramazani, Jahan; Ellman, R; & O’Clair, R. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. WW Norton & Company: New York. 2003. 461.

Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. WW Norton & Company: New York. 2003. 294-295.

Image: http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/08/Red_Wheelbarrow.jpg

The Wasteland: Quintessential Modernism

Modernism in literature emerged during a time of great upheaval, during World War I. The mass death of millions of young men aided in the loss of innocence to the human race. During this time, people began to look at the world in a different way--less hopeful and idealistic. Writers at this time rejected a “belief in absolute, knowable truth” and replaced the absolute with a “sense of relative, provisional truths” (Cuddy-Keane).

In The Wasteland Eliot provides small vignettes of modern life, of people, individuals who are either caught up in the overwhelming social forces of their world or who are struggling to maintain some kind of individual nature..and often getting beaten back in the process. This element of fragmented scenes without any logical timeline is a major characteristic of modernism. Many modernist writers viewed time not as a progressing line but as a “discontinuous, overlapping, non-chronological” collage of moments in life (Cuddy-Keane).

In fact, Eliot structured the poem to refer back to Classical and Romantic elements, but always in ways that form an echo rather than a connection. We are cut off from, disconnected, from those roots. Thus, many people reading The Wasteland get the feeling that they are not “in” on the joke or that their understanding of what is going on is just out of their reach.



In addition, modernism is often pessimistic and takes a dim view of the culture and the future. Eliot exploits this dramatically and succinctly with his terse, formal glimpses of mundane elements of London life. He uses formal, stylistic words to describe rundown, everyday places and people. Rather than the poetic notion that the city is a teeming, life-giving, bustling collection of humanity he presents it as a wasted land of broken images, with people seeking solace in games and chances and Tarot cards. This description of London as a wasteland is perhaps Eliot’s way of coping with the destruction wrought on London during World War I.

An important characteristic of modernism that shows up throughout The Wasteland is a rejection of a single, omniscient narrator. He does not utilize a single hero or narrative voice, but rather the fragmented and disjointed narratives told from different perspectives. In “The Burial of the Dead” a girl named Marie narrates part of the poem: “My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,/And I was frightened. He said, Marie,/Marie, hold on tight. And down we went” (Eliot 474). In “A Game of Chess,” the narrator, according to Eliot’s notes, is a story told to them by the maid: “When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said--/I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself/...Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart” (Eliot 478). The Wasteland incorporates the point of view of many characters, throwing out the old notion of one all-knowing narrator.

Eliot uses formal, stylistic words to describe rundown, everyday places and people. He does not utilize a single hero or narrative voice, but rather the fragmented and disjointed narratives told from different perspectives. He is not so concerned with what it all means, but with the way it actually is. Eliot’s The Wasteland introduces and utilizes many characteristics of Modernist literature, including the use of multiple narrators to depict moments in everyday life. The Wasteland is clearly one of the first, and most influential pieces of literature in the Modernist period.


Works Cited:
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. "Modernism: Some Characteristics." ENGB02Y: English Literature: Historical Survey. http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~mcuddy/ENGB02Y/Modernism.html

Eliot, T.S. "The Wasteland." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. WW Norton & Company: New York. 2003. 474-487.

Image
The Wasteland: http://www.thoughtaudio.com/titlelist/TA0032-Wasteland/0032-WASTELAND.jpg