William Carlos Williams, “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” Dial, 1921.
Introduction
William Carlos Williams (Rutherford, New Jersey, September 17 of 1883 - ibid, March 4 of1963) was a writer U.S. linked to modernism and imagism. It is especially known for his poetry. In addition to practice as a doctor and write dramas and prose varied, Williams is one of the poets' modernists most innovative and admired. He was a classmate of poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and the early poems were influenced by the imagism.
He later became a promoter of literary use of spoken colloquial. Her ear for the rhythms of natural English spoken helped free the poetry of the metric that prevailed in the verse in English from the Renaissance. Overcome the tendency imagist, is a poet of great expressive simplicity and easy to understand, with a taste for the riddle, interested in the constant experimentation and intimacy lyric. Like other modernists, try diluting the figure of the poet, leaving that speaks the poem itself (Mariani, pp. 121-129).
Discussion
Williams believes that the true objective awakens the imagination of the perceiver, not the reverse. Use the free verse and visual layout of the lines mark the poetic structure. In his Paterson, written over several years, mixing poetry, prose and even fragments of collage including advertising. It is a kind of bio epic of a doctor-poet, but formally consists of a montage of scenes and images with a few verbs that explicitly link.
The poem written by William Carols Williams by the name “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” Dial, 1921 considered to be the one of the best masterpiece of Williams because in this poem, Williams highlighted his love and passion for the baseball game from the eye of a person who sitting in the crowd.
The poem highly describes the love of Williams for the baseball and no doubt that during that period, baseball became the most popular game of the United States. According to the writer, the poem as by the title covers all the aspects of the crowd, for example, when the game is interesting than at that time crowd is enthusiastic, when the game is in the boring phase, the crowd also start getting bored. Therefore, Williams's main aim was to highlight each and every aspect of the crowd, who is completely mad for the baseball game (Willaims, et. al., pp. 185-192).
Williams gave different names to the crowd in the poem. At one stage, he referred the crowd by the name of “Beautiful”, similarly, at one stage, the crowd was named as “saluted”, and at last the crowd was called as “defied”. According to the writer, all these terms referred to the different emotional conditions of the crowd during the match because everyone knows the fact the Americans really passionate for the game, and to control emotions during the game is not an easy task.
The author further describes that the poem was written after the WW I and the Russian Revolution that is why the readers witnessed a revolution touch in the poem because in the 20th century, Europe witnessed a radical increase in fascism and the United States was witnessing The Ku Kulx Klan, however, after the release of the most controversial movie of that time “Birth of a Nation”, the safety concerns for the white Christian American risen. Therefore, to protect themselves, they armed themselves. However, the main concern of the white Christian Americans was that they feared or misguidedly believed that the African Americans, Irish Catholics and other foreign cultures are against them and all of them united against them.
Therefore, this lead to a great hustle because things were really messed up after the Word War I because Williams mentioned that the group that was in power enjoyed complete freedom and autonomy, whereas, the minorities were forced to get aside and they were living a miserable life. The society was witnessing great humiliation of the social values where everyone had the right to live and to enjoy all the basic necessities of life. The feelings of hunger, hate, racism, anger, and sense of superiority totally captured the society. That is why, Williams developed such a title for the poem, which highlighted the concept of crowd because in that period, there was no respect for humanity and human beings were treated as crowd (Whitaker, pp. 56-65).
Another interesting that the writer felt to highlight for the readers is that the leadership of that era, completely manipulated the crowd. Every leader, just made use of the crowd and no one showed sincerity with the society. During the study of literature, the writer came across that whether, it was Hitler or Stalin, Lenin or Trotsky, everyone used the crowd for their personal issues.
In this way, the main theme of Williams behind writing the poem was to hit those areas that he felt that the leadership was not sincere with the society. Every leader influenced the crowd for his own personal desires. However, at last the author mentioned that the poem is not all about the love and passion for the base ball game. The author point out that the ending of the poem is quite ambiguous because the crowd was laughing loudly, enjoying every moment with full devotion but the main issue was that there was not any thought process behind the happiness of the crowd. The writer talked about the dilemma that discussed the different approaches of different groups among the crowd. Williams specifically highlighted the Jews because they were in the minority at that time and they were feeling really difficulties in adjusting in the society.
After Effects of the Poem
The Democrats modern (left U.S.) portray him as close to their progressive ideas left. As his numerous publications in journals politically radical, like Blast and New Masses (new weights), political preferences went to the left. He regarded himself as a socialist and opposed to capitalism, and in 1935 he published The Yachts, a poem that describes the wealthy elite as parasites and hoping the masses as revolution. The poem uses the metaphor of the ocean with the water bodies of impoverished masses fighting over their poor shells, in agony, desperate, trying to sink the yacht and to end the horror of the human race. Similarly, in the introduction to his poetry collection The Wedge, published in 1944, he describes socialism as an inevitable condition of development, and a need for a true artistic development. In 1949 he published a poem (Brinnin, pp. 201-210), The Pink Church (Pink House), which deals with the human body, but also in the context of McCarthyism, as dangerously pro-Communist. The anti caused his dismissal from his post as advisor to the Library of Congress in 1952/3, which made ??him depressed. As shown in an article written for non-published Blast, Williams believed that artists should resist producing propaganda and devote him to writing. In the same article, he proclaims that art can also serve the proletariat.
Work Cited
Brinnin, John M. William Carlos Williams. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. pp. 201-210. Print.
Mariani, Paul L. William Carlos Williams. Chicago: American Library Association, 1975. pp. 121-129 Print
Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968. pp. 56-65 Print
Williams, William C, A W. Litz, and Christopher J. MacGowan. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1986. pp. 185-192. Print
