Get Lit Minute

William Carlos Williams | "The Red Wheelbarrow"

June 01, 2020 Get Lit - Words Ignite Season 1 Episode 6
Get Lit Minute
William Carlos Williams | "The Red Wheelbarrow"
Show Notes

In this episode of Get Lit Minute, we discuss the life and work of William Carlos Williams. A full-time doctor and literary figure, Williams helped change the language of American poetry by mimicking the language of the American people. Williams' life and work is an example of the experience we all have when deciding to become an artist.

Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. “No one believes that poetry can exist in his own life,” Williams said. “The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.”

Historical Research: The Poetry Foundation

"This is Just to Say — A Poem and its Parodies". The Attic. Retrieved 31 July 2019

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