Thoughts on Williams and Stevens

Over the past few weeks/months I've been reading from time to time in an anthology of American poetry, particularly looking at some of the poets who I read a lot in college and grad school and have seldom read since then. I may at some point post in more detail about some of these poets and some of their most famous poems, but at this point I have some overall notes and observations. Taking 3 of the great modernist poets: In college I loved W.C. Williams, found his poems open and insightful and inviting, loved his commitment to American landscapes, lingo, and people. Coming back to Williams, the bloom has faded (my bloom, possibly). I think what drew me to WCW was in part the desire to imitate, and his poems were the easiest to imitate, superficially anyway. For every great Red Wheelbarrow or "Saw the Number 5 in Gold" I'm afraid there are plenty of his poems that are just notes - and even so that was an important step in American letters, a step that led on to the Beats and many fine lyric poets throughout the 20th century - couldn't have done it without his laying the course. But to read his poems now? They feel somehow antique. I'm always struck by the oddity that his two most atypical poems - Tract and The Yachts - are the two most often anthologized, so what does that tell us, if anything? Contrast with Wallace Stevens. Yes, I read him in college but in a totally ignorant way, just reading through the verse as if it were prose and emerging totally bewildered and unmoved. Looking back now at some of his longer poems (not the late poems, however -that's a challenge of a different order, and the same could be said of Williams for that matter) I found some pleasure in parsing the most difficult passages in some of the chestnuts that, though I didn't know this, I'd never read carefully enough in my youth. Odd that both Stevens and Williams were poets who lived a complete professional life (today, that's almost unimaginable for a poet!) - and Williams drew often on his experiences as a doctor while Stevens never wrote (at least directly) about his work in the insurance industry. Score one for Williams there - great to se a poet drawing on life and not solely on his facility with language. Whereas Williams lead on to an open and accessible form of poetry, Stevens led on to what I consider the dead end of "language poetry," the kind of stuff that wins prizes and New Yorker publication and nobody gives a damn about. Still, Stevens's best poems merit studious reading - they will pay you back. As to Williams, you probably have to read widely in his work and take it as a whole rather than parse some of the relatively, and intentionally, straightforward gems such as Danse Russe.