William Carlos Williams: Freeing Poetry! Williams eliminates traditional poetic structure to free the real poetry inherent in the sounds and meanings of words. In his poetry he offers an aesthetic lesson on how to use his poetry as a way of looking at reality. On a literal level, his poem speaks self-reflexively about its meaning: "It is difficult to get news from poems, and yet men die miserably every day for want of what lies there." His poetry attempts to re-engage people with reality. As he claims: "Anything is good material for poetry. Anything" (Paterson V). This belief is highlighted in a passage from "Two Pendants: By the Ears": 2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab 24 hours from the Pacific, and 2 live frozen trout from Denmark. He turns a trendy shopping list into poetry by arranging the words on the page in a way allowing the poetic rhythm to emerge (Weatherhead 108). Rather than creating poetry according to the conventional choice of images and creating analogies between them, his main focus is on the arrangement of words to create rhythm. In “The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams takes familiar images but rearranges them in a way that emphasizes their meaning differently. meanings through rhythm. It does this by breaking down a few sentences that conventionally flow together in the mind: “it depends” is separated from “above,” “wheel” is separated from “mound,” “rain” is separated from “water” and “white.” is disjunct from "chickens". By altering the rhythm through the divergent arrangement of words on the page, Williams creates a new context through which to view and absorb familiar images (Koch 50). This rebirth of the ability to engage old images in new ways structurally serves the significant poetic function (which makes the literal phrase about men dying miserably every day for lack of what is found in poetry) of reminding us of the value of poetry in connecting us with reality. . Its shifting poetic structure forces the reader to engage with its images in new ways. Williams further explains to the reader how to visualize his poems in one titled "To a Solitary Discipline": Note rather, mon cher, that the moon is inclined above the tip of the steeple rather than that. its color is shell pink. Observe rather