XI: Williams’s Poetic Realization of Confusion,Isolation, Separation, Liberation

In William Carlos Williams’s poem entitled “XI” in his anthology “Spring and All” he presents a picture of disparate elements, where each snippet of a seemingly objectified image is presented in concise two-line stanzas. He begins the poem with a sense of movement, bringing the reader initially into his active “passing” on “nothing in the world.” This initial statement serves as an indication of the initial state of confusion that Williams professes in the prose sections of “Spring and All” as a necessary impetus for specific phases of creation. As he passes the confusing nothingness, Williams sets up with this opening the framework of confusion, separation, and isolation of observed objects or ideas in order for him to act out, through the poem itself, his aesthetic theory which ends, ideally, in creative liberation. In the fragmentary presentation of different elements of a scene he is observing– “an elderly man,” “a woman in blue,” and “a boy of eight,” whose unity is understood but not directly explicated– Williams has moved, in act of “separation,” past his initial confusion. He then develops, as the poem does, toward a creative revaluation of nature: the scene observed. This revaluation renders the “nameless spectacle” real and thus “supremely important”  for Williams in the sense that it serves not it’s own self but a purpose established in the poet’s isolation of it, in the “imaginative suspense” he cultivates with it. It seems that as he “[speeds] by them/ without a word,” unconcerned with his next destination, Williams has reached the liberation that he seeks both through and from that which he creates. He is able to recognize, appreciate, and give form to the otherwise insignificant spectacle and is moreover able to glaze over this supreme act of creation unaffected, a poetic symbol (or perhaps realization) of his “perfect ability to record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives” yet to still remain “detached from the necessity of recording it” (Spring and All 48 & 50).