To quote myself in a review done for a grad school class assignment:

"Since a young age, I can remember finding most poetry cheesy or pretentious or both. Perhaps that is a defense mechanism to distract from the often uncomfortably personal or intimate subject matter that is typical of the genre. Poetic language has long been a vehicle for discussing topics seen too sensitive to be explicated through prose, so you encounter the same tired subjects of romantic love and sexuality and grief and fear. Don't get me wrong, these are universal human experiences and powerful subjects of exploration. But how many poems have we all read about a woman's "porcelain skin, white as snow" or a man's "despair as dark and infinite as a bottomless abyss"?

That's why when I decided to give poetry another try, I chose to pick up my mother's college copy of selected poems by William Carlos Williams. I had encountered a few of his more famous works (e.g. "This is Just to Say", "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower", "The Red Wheelbarrow") in English classes throughout my life, but never dedicated any significant amount of time to delving into his corpus.

I was so pleasantly surprised. The range of emotion captured through his work was vast and the depth of feeling profound, all under the veneer of objectivity and plain speech, or sometimes even humor. His style is completely unpretentious but not uncomplex. He nestles layers of meaning and sentiment beneath familiarity or (seeming) minutiae. He examines topics such as love and sensuality and melancholy and joy in ways that were novel and revolutionary yet completely obvious. He is able to convey volumes in just a single stanza or sentence. He makes common language and the universality of daily life his tools to explore multilayered, enigmatic feelings and experiences. As the collection is composed of examples from the entire span of his life, the style and subjects vary drastically, yet still feel like a cohesive compilation from a single artist with a strong and distinctive voice.

I read the entire collection without rolling my eyes once, a significant milestone in mine and poetry's relationship. "

3,5

I wanted to like wcw because writer friends I deeply respect love him but i fucking hated this book for the most part

I like his poems a lot.

WCW is a great poet, I think. I feel like I loved a third of these poems, understood but didn’t fully connect to another third, and was left baffled by the last third. This edition is just poems from roughly 1912-1950, with no notes or annotations, so if you don’t understand a reference, it’s up to you to look it up and parse out it’s meaning.

The poems I really loved were:

“Tract”
“Pastoral”
“Dedication for a Plot of Ground”
“The Last Words of My English Grandmother”
“Spring and All: XXVI”*
“The Descent of Winter”
“Impromptu: The Suckers”
“It is a Living Coral”
“On Gay Wallpaper”
“The Trees”
“The Birds’ Companion”
“Rain”
“To A Poor Old Woman”
“The Catholic Bells”
“Fine Work With Pitch and Copper”
“Burning the Christmas Greens”
“April 6”
“The Visit”
“The Clouds”

I wanted to love this, and worry for my apparently less-than-poetic soul. Maybe there was too much buildup of "this is the most important poet you will read, this is "the image" guy"! Maybe it's that he was a doctor and I've worked with too many doctors who are in love with the sound of their own voice and I'm jaded. Some of the poems were delicate and felt perfect, some made me frustrated. Not nearly enough of them made me feel anything at all. So am I disappointed in the poems themselves? Or in the promise of some kind of poetic ideal. Not sure.