William Carlos Williams: Poems Literary Elements

Most of Williams's poems are told from the perspective of a first-person speaker who writes in a direct and undecorated style. In some cases, the speaker is clearly Williams himself, but in others the parallel is primarily implied through the register of the voice. Poems like "This Is Just To Say" make overt references to real events from Williams's life. Others, like "Between Walls," potentially offer scenes from Williams's life (the poem occurs in a hospital) but draw less obvious comparisons.

A majority of Williams's poems are written in free verse and make frequent use of enjambment between the lines. In his sparest works, Williams did away entirely with punctuation. In Paterson, he made use of his own form of prosody.

Williams mostly rejected the use of figurative language in his work, preferring concrete details to the ornamentation of metaphor and simile. However, in the poem "It Is a Living Coral," Williams compares iron plates expanding and contracting to the petals of a lily.

Alliteration and assonance are not especially common in Williams work, but do appear occasionally. In "This Is Just To Say" there is alliteration in the S sounds of the line "so sweet" and in "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" in the W sounds of the line "the wings' wax." In "Danse Russe" there is assonance in the I sound of "and the sun is a flame-white disc / in silken mist."

The majority of Williams's work is very straightforward and resists strains of irony. Even the humorous moments in his work tend to be fairly earnest in tone.

Many of Williams's poems depict average scenes from domestic and city life.

Most of Williams's poems are set in various parts of his home state of New Jersey, from industrial spaces like power plants and hospitals to farms and forests.

While the tone of Williams's work is variable, it is usually plain-spoken and clear with occasional humor.

In Williams's work, the protagonist is usually the speaker of the poem, a figure often very similar to Williams himself. There is rarely a directly antagonistic character but rather emotions like regret, grief and frustration.

While Williams's poetry doesn't tend to have a great deal of conflict, the main tension tends to be a struggle to find meaning in everyday occurrences.

The climax, or turning point, of many of Williams's poems takes place in their penultimate stanzas. These moments often take the shape of a new image or idea that reframes the rest of the poem.

The opening line of "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" ("Sorrow is my own yard") foreshadows that the poem will be about grief.

In the poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," the speaker uses understatement to describe Icarus's crash into the ocean, referring to it as a "a splash quite unnoticed."

Williams makes a number of allusions to other works of art in his poetry. The title of "Danse Russe" is derived from the famous ballet, The Nutcracker. "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" references the Bruegel painting of the same name. In the poem "Lear," Williams alludes to King Lear, an early historical figure and the protagonist in the Shakespeare play "King Lear."

Williams's poems rarely make use of metonymy or synecdoche, as he was very focused on specificity in his images and scenes.

Williams's poems tend to avoid personifying objects.

In the poem "This Is Just To Say," the speaker feels a dramatic sense of guilt about eating his wife's plums. His feeling appears to be hyperbolic in the context of his relatively minor actions.

In "Danse Russe," the sing-song repetition of the word "lonely" in the line "“I am lonely, lonely" is onomatopoeic.