analysis of williams
Williams's body of work is quite large, containing well-over thirty works, and hundreds of poems. He was influenced by many different things, including the Transcendentalists of the previous century, his modernist friends, like Pound Eliot, and Doolittle, by the ordinary things around him, and by an uniquely American experience.
Williams had always loved William Shakespeare. Williams's father, William George Williams, was very found of Shakespeare, and English theater in general, and what little time he did spend with his family, he taught a love for Shakespeare. William's father even staged productions of different plays in the cellar of their house, and William and his brother Ed would play out the Shakespeare roles in amateur-theater. Shakespeare's mastery of language and character development is referenced in Williams's poem "Lear". In "Lear", Williams discusses the natural conflicts that one faces.
Wiliams's continually draws on Thoreau and Whitman for ideas about the self and its relation to nature, as seen in "Lear". Another work entitled "The Yachts", which appeared in the same volume of work, Selected Poems, also talks about this conflict with nature, and how it draws us back, even though we can't hope to tame it.
This is but a small part of the work that Williams did. His magnum opus, Paterson, and epic poem in five books, is a culmination of much of what Williams's was and is. To try to analyze all of Williams's is an impossible task, but biographer Paul Mariani sums it up best: "[Williams had the] urge, the need, perhaps, to plunge into to the depths and make contact. To make it--life, language--fresh once more... To see a new world, naked." (Mariani, 2)
