William Carlos Williams: This Is Just To Say

4 Pages 1068 Words

Is It Any Good? William Carlos Williams published “Spring and All: A Collection of Poems and Essays” in 1923, which includes the poem “This Is Just To Say”. The inspiration for this poem came from Marcel Duchamps’ “ready mades,” or the concept that one takes something out of everyday life and turns it into art. Thus making the statement that art is not necessary something of content but of framing. In “This Is Just To Say,” Williams turns a note he (or someone else perhaps) wrote into a piece of art. By giving it a title and including it with the rest of his work, it becomes a poem. In the poem, Williams describes a scene in which someone is apologizing for stealing a plum. Cast in the form of a note left on the refrigerator, the poem sounds “found.”As with the found poem, the lack of a meditating voice leaves the reader with a wide range of potential meanings. Oddly (some may think), although this much-anthologized poem is firmly in the canon of the twentieth-century poetry, there is no general agreement as to its theme. Any thematic interpretation is made self-consciously and somewhat uncertainly. The reader is left to construct a poem, and the reader becomes the owner of the resulting poem. The question is, then, how could a poem that many argue isn’t even a poem be “firmly planted in the canon” and, more importantly to this essay, is it even any good?
We turn to the criteria set forth in “The Art of Poetry”, in which Horace explains the qualities of a “good” poem. He says, “Poets aim to benefit or to please, or to combine the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life...when you are giving precepts of any kind, be succinct, so that receptive minds may easily grasp what you are saying and retain it firmly...” After reading several of Williams’ poems, a common characteristic emerges in that his poems are rather extensive and the words contain much deeper...