Art on Art on Art. Parallels in poems by William Carlos Williams and visual arts

Modernist poetry, which emerged in the first two decades of the 20th century had the main aim to eliminate rigid structures of romantic poetry. The images and objects put into words as well as the visual appearance of the poem itself were to express their true nature and to be freed from metaphors they were connected with before.
William Carlos Williams is one of the most important poets of the American modernism. He understands perfectly well to combine visual experience with words and the link from some of his poems to works of visual arts and vice versa is more than apparent. This paper focuses on the correlation between those diverse pieces of art. After a short introduction to the life of and influence on Williams in Chapter 2 Chapter 3 draws parallels between the work of Alfred Stieglitz and that of William Carlos Williams. This does not only hold for similarities in the objects and image depicted as in “Spring Showers” and “Young Sycamore”, which have been discussed in literature before. It also applies to the mere force of expression that is analogical in the photograph “Apples and Gable” and the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”.
The constellation of a poem by Williams serving as an inspiring source for a piece of visual arts is focused on in Chapter 4. Williams’ poem “The Great Figure” is analysed and paralleled with the painting “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold” by Charles Demuth. As an example for the indirect inspirational character of Williams’ poem one work by Robert Indiana is introduced directly pointing to Demuth’s painting. Although Indiana is an important representative of American pop art, which evolved out of criticism concerning some aspects of modernist art, similarities in both concepts as well as in all three pieces of art can be identified.