So I'm happy to be back to William Carlos Williams because I like Williams so much. And he too was very influenced by the Imagist Revolution and really is very important part of the early stages of modernism in America in the 20th century. And he went in for images and briefly but that's not so important as his own contribution to the aesthetic of condensation and of focus, and of using any material for the subject of poetry. So we have a two line poem called "Lines" from 1921. I'll read it and then you can talk about it, okay? "Leaves are graygreen, the glass broken, bright green." Two lines. It rhymes, I guess. Seems insignificant? I mean, Williams is really going to come in for criticism, writing poems that are notes for on a refrigerator about how he took the plums. He's going to come in for lot. This seems like a poem that's extremely open to that criticism. So what? Kristin, what do you say when someone says, "So what? What is this"? Well, I think that it's taking... It's kind of similar to the HD stuff that we were doing in the beginning because it's taking what you would assume and about nature and separating it. Because you'd have, "The leaves are graygreen," so what is natural is dull. And then the glass is bright green, so it's artificialist. He's reversing. Yeah. Reversing what? Our symbols basically. Okay. How would you say that what he's reversing? Amarise? Something that's supposed to be vibrant and full of life has this, as Kristen was saying, this sort of washed out quality whereas the glass really shines for him, stands out in his poem. So let's create a series of oppositions, let's just develop a vocabulary for this. What's being reversed? Max, give us some terms for the opposition. It's seems to be organic versus inorganic or manufactured. Organic versus manufactured. Anybody else? Let's creates some oppositions. Dave? Whole versus broken. Whole versus broken, love that. Right, whole versus broken. Let's come back to these, but some more? Living versus dead. Living versus dead or, you know, animate and inanimate. Any others? Natural... Manmade. Manmade or artificial. I mean, the embrace of artifice by these writers is very important. Artifice can be natural and natural, such as that American Beauty rose, can be artifice. When someone comes to you during Valentine's Day with an American Beauty rose, you can either say, "You're very thoughtful. You're participating in conventional American symbolism, but you're doing it for me and I appreciate it and I know this rose costs some money." Or you could, say, slam the door in his face or her face and say, "How dare you come to me with a dead symbol?" And the fellow or the gal who bought the American Beauty rose might well say, "I didn't mean it to be a dead symbol." Well, but it is. So to reverse it, you want to show up at the door on Valentine's Day with a piece of broken green glass. That's challenging. Okay, so why challenge values this way? What's wrong with nature? Anne, what's wrong with nature? What would Williams say about nature here? Well, I think he would say that nature's been already hashed out by the Romantics and by the Victorians. So we live in a new time, we need new symbols. We need new associations, we need new things to be able to talk about and write about how we feel. Make it new. And maybe, you can find beauty anywhere. Of course he's saying that. Anything can be the material for poetry. But, by the way, anything could include leaves, but he's not going there because he's a radical, because he wants to create a revolution, a poetic revolution. So once again, it's got to be meta poetic or I'm really sorry. But it's got to be. It's got to be because the title. The title, even without the title, Dave, I'd say it's meta poetic because it's choosing - deliberately, moralizingly, polemically - choosing the artificial over the... And if you said to Bill, "Are you going to write a poem about how leaves are nicer than broken glass?" He'd probably say, "No, that's been done." So he's being polemical. But how does the title teach us about how to read the poem? To me, "Lines" could reference not only the lines, the physical lines of the poem, but it could also be - and this is a notch, but I'm going to do it anyway - like Wordsworth, "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey," just a super romantic... The title might be referring to the tradition... Of writing of pastoral... Of lines on lines about. Tell us a little more about that tradition. Well, for Wordsworth, "Lines Written," it's just the one that I'm thinking of now. He had a bunch of lines written somewhere about, you know, he'd go into this place and he'd just kind of like wax poetic about how great nature is and kind of the sublime experience of... The nature poets. So lines is a word... I'm going with you. I'm not entirely agreeing with you, but I'm going with you. Lines is a term, a titular term, that gets used in the tradition of nature poetry and of poetry that's about a moment of reflection that allows the self to express itself emotionally. And the human experience. And he's going against that. Williams is going against that. Okay. There is also a tone to the word lines. Good luck with this one; this is hard. There is a tone. Diction. When someone uses the word "lines" instead of a poem that says "A reason why nature is not as cool as artifice," you know. That could be a poem title, but this just says "Lines." What's the tone? Kristen? It's rendering it more aesthetic. Okay, it's focusing on the aesthetic. But that doesn't tell me about a tone. Tone meaning like angry, immodest, sad. Isn't it kind of argumentative? It's just saying like it's a poem whether we think it is or not? It could be. That's such an interesting... I'm thinking of it in the opposite. "Lines" is the kind of title we give to something that's, "Well, these are just lines." It's a kind of modesty, lines. Even in the romantic tradition, "These are lines on... It's not important. I just wrote some lines. Lines. Here are some lines." Line also is really, it almost, to your interpretation, what else? Molly, in the fashion world, what's a line? While you're thinking, I'll go to Max. In the political world, what's a line? A party line. A party line. It's sectarian, it's polemical. What's the line on this? Say, Max, you're the Kommissar, what's the line? What line do I have to take on nature? Well, you have to say that nature is no good anymore because we're all about Stakhanovite, artificial manufacture. That's the line, the party line. How about in fashion? Like a silhouette or a shape of an article of clothing. In programmatic terms, polemical terms in fashion? Anyone? Like his fall line. Fall line. This is the aesthetic. "Line" actually means aesthetic. It means political program and aesthetic. It's a powerful term. It's a really... Amarise, are you happy about this poem? It's a lot more complicated than you thought. Yeah, I was thinking, actually, about the meta poetic quality of it and here, we have the second line. "Broken," as it says, by a comma, just like the glass, broken. We were talking before about... Cool. The comma breaks up the line. ...the transparency of language and here he is saying, "Well, leaves are something you look at, but glass something you either look through or look at to see your own reflection." But the glass here is bright green, so it has a color, and if the color is Williams' vision perhaps. Very good. Let's conclude by saying something about the rhyme. Is there something, part of the polemic of this "make it new modernism" that leads us to seeing this rhyme as significant or is it not significant? Emily? Oh, I don't know. Well, you can pass on to Kristen. What do you think Kristen? I think maybe, by having two lines rhyme, it renders them as parallel images. And so it's saying that it's not exactly the formula that Pound would have, but it's similar. So when you rhyme, and the rhymes are the same words, or at least the last syllable, the rhyming syllable is the same, usually rhyme is different. "Oh my, he found or she found a way of rhyming dissonant, different things that harmonize." Rhyme harmonizes, right? And the modern poets, they're into free verse and they're not into rhyme because rhyme harmonizes and they want disjunction. But this is a rhyme, green-green. So is there any - we're going to overread here - but is there anything to say about rhyming with the same? Well, to me, like if you're in second grade and you're supposed to write a rhyming poem... They don't want you to do the same words. They don't want you to do the same words. So, to me, this actually kind of even... I think this is more powerful that it does rhyme than if it didn't rhyme. It creates a sense of sameness, just in a poem which is telling you that nature and artifice are different. It's saying, "You know, hey, everything is subject for poetry. I'm going put everything in there." So, in a way, he slightly recuperates this polemical thing he's saying against nature. It's a nature poem that wants to include artifice as part of nature and part of us.
