ELIT 48C Class #19

Eminent versus Imminent Eminent means "distinguished or superior"; imminent means "impending, sure to happen." Also, eminent domain is the right of a government to take over private property for public use.

Examples: The rain was imminent; it would arrive soon, soaking the eminent dignitaries on the stage. (Think of imminent and impending, which both begin with the same letters.)

AGENDA

Paraphrasing Poetry“In a Station of the Metro.”Author Introduction:

William Carlos Williams

How to Paraphrase

• A Paraphrase is a restatement of a passage giving the meaning in another form. This usually involves expanding the original text so as to make it clear.

• A paraphrase will have none of the beauty or effectiveness of the original. It merely aims, in its prosy way, to spell out the literal meaning. It will not substitute for the original, then, but will help us appreciate the compactness and complexity of many poems.

• Write in prose, not verse (in prose the lines go all the way to right margin). The line breaks of the original are irrelevant in paraphrasing.

• Write modern prose, rearranging word order and sentence structure as necessary. As far as possible, within the limits of commonsense, avoid using the words of the original. Finding new words to express the meaning is a test of what you are understanding.

• Write coherent syntax, imitating that of the original if you can do so with ease, otherwise breaking it down into easier sentence forms.

• Write in the same grammatical person and tense as the original. If the original is in the first person, as many poems are, so must the paraphrase be.

• Spell out explicitly what the original implies or conveys by hints. It follows that a paraphrase will normally be longer than the original.

• Spell out explicitly all the possible meanings if the original is ambiguous (saying two or more things at once), as many poems are.

• Use square brackets to mark off any additional elements you find it necessary to insert for the coherence of the meaning. The brackets will show that these bits are editorial -- contributed by you for the sake of clarity but not strictly "said" in the original. An example might be some implied transitional phrase or even an implied thought that occurs to the speaker causing a change in tone or feeling.

In Groups: A Discussion1. Paraphrase “In a Station of the Metro”2. QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro” 3. A new critical reading of “In a Station

of the Metro”

Who can paraphrase “In a

Station of the Metro”?

In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

A new critical reading of “In a Station of the Metro”

• The ‘faces in the crowd’ is easy enough to understand but adding ‘apparitions’ before it gives us an image of bland, beige figures, and just like ghosts the faces disappear and become unimportant in the image of the big crowd. But the image of petals, especially fresh petals, represents a kind of beauty, and if those petals were of a vibrant color than it would be symbolic of life.

• The intrigue of “In a Station of the Metro” derives from what Pound omits. The beating heart of the poem is indeed invisible; all Pound leaves the reader is the semicolon that links lines 1 and 2. Implied is the conceit, and the verb of the second line. What the reader can discern, however, is that there is a conceit of some sort, and it involves the juxtaposition between the pulsating, mechanized, bustling life of the modern Metro station (line 1), and the still, virginal life of the petals of a black bough (line 2).

QHQ on “In a Station of the Metro”

1. Q: Why does Ezra Pound write this poem in only two lines?

2. Q. What is the meaning this poem is trying to convey?

3. Q: Can we classify Ezra Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro” as Literature since it is only two lines?

4. Q: In writing a two line poem, is Ezra Pound taking his manifesto overly seriously?

5. Q: If “In a Station of the Metro” is the quintessential imagist poem, what does that mean about imagism in general?

6. Q: Is “In a station of the Metro” just about the image?

Author Introduction

William Carlos Williams

"William Carlos Williams." Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition. Ed. Frank Northen Magill. Salem Press, Inc., 1997.

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883, to a mother born in Puerto Rico and an English father. Both parents figure in a number of Williams’s poems. In 1902 Williams began the study of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and while a student formed important friendships with Ezra Pound and the painter Charles Demuth. In 1910 Williams began his forty-year medical practice in Rutherford, marrying Florence Herman in 1912.

Williams’s first book of poems, entitled Poems and privately printed by a local stationer, was replete with the kind of archaic poetic diction and romantic longing typical of much American magazine poetry at the time. As a result of Pound’s directive that he become more aware of avant-garde work in music, painting, prose, and poetry, Williams’s next book, The Tempers, reflected Pound’s pre-Imagist manner—a variety of verse forms, short monologues, and medieval and Latinate allusions.

Williams labored on his writing for the next twenty years, largely unrecognized except by readers of the short-lived small magazines that printed experimental American work. What some critics consider Williams’s finest book, the prose and poetry sequence Spring and All, was printed in Paris in an edition of only three hundred and not reprinted in full until 1970, seven years after his death. This book contains the famous “The Red Wheelbarrow,” later printed by Williams as a separate poem, and often anthologized as the quintessential Imagist expression.

In the 1930’s, Williams’s work took a more overtly political turn, although he had always shared the view of Pound and Eliot that the work of the poet was central to the health and potential of a civilization and that the state of a culture was reflected in its response to its serious artists.

In the 1950’s, Williams became an important figure for poets seeking an alternative to the neoclassical poetics of T. S. Eliot and his followers, and such figures as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov acknowledged a large debt to his example. Since that decade, too, Williams’s career-long achievement has gradually come to be more and more fully recognized. Although still not accorded the status of Eliot and Stevens by some critics of modernism, on the whole these two—along with Williams and Pound—are considered the four major figures of American modernist poetry.

HOMEWORK Read: William Carlos

Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and “To Elsie”

Post #12 QHQ on either of the poems for today’s reading. Or paraphrase “The Red Wheelbarrow” or 6-9 lines from “To Elsie.”