A common motif in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams is the search for thingness. Stevens admits that a thing never exists without its relation to surroundings. There have been resemblances among things in a community. In these cases, things are not bare facts but contain something invisible as a result of long mutual influences between them and the human mind. Such invisibility is not of the kind which the transformative Romantic imagination is likely to put into nature. For Stevens, it is life, not the artist, that creates reality. A thing is not an objectivity but a creation of life where the poet as a constituent influences and is influenced by other constituents. Williams’s language often focuses on a series of particular parts of a thing, while deliberately obstructing the establishment of any organization among them. A part, disconnected from others, is objective as long as it does not contribute to the whole presumed by the poet’s mind. Although connected to human consciousness, a thing of this kind is too hard to be permeated by it. A thing resumes its own thingness when divested of humanistic control over it. Thus, the poet should somehow extend himself to the thing without its conceptualization. Williams’s typical line-making in such poems as “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “View of a Lake” is designed to compose a moment of a thing as a permanent whole.
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