William Carlos Williams' "A Coronal"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2021
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.
In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked".[1]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, August 9th. And today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet William Carlos Williams. He was born in 1883 and he lived until 1963. In addition to being a poet, he was also a physician. And this aspect of his life greatly |
| 0:24.7 | influenced his poetry. I think for a couple of reasons. One is that because of his medical |
| 0:30.2 | training, he had just had this precision with language and description that seems to spring from |
| 0:36.8 | his great knowledge of the human body |
| 0:39.3 | in the natural world that he gained through his training as physician and also this honed |
| 0:44.6 | in ability with language to be very, very precise. And also, as he said about himself, he, as a |
| 0:52.8 | physician, he witnessed great amount of human suffering, and that had |
| 0:57.0 | a big impact on him as a poet. So today's poem is called a coronal, and this is how it goes. |
| 1:04.7 | New books of poetry will be written. New books and unheard of manuscripts will come wrapped in brown paper, many and many a time the postman will bow and sidled down the leaf plastered steps thumbing over other men's business but we ran ahead of it all one coming after could have seen her footprints in the wet and followed |
| 1:28.6 | us among the stark chestnuts. An enemy sprang where she pressed and cresses stood green |
| 1:35.2 | in the slender source. And new books of poetry will be written, leather colored oak leaves, |
| 1:42.3 | many and many a time. |
| 1:51.1 | I really like this poem because I find it quite puzzling and surprising. |
| 1:53.1 | And I'm going to comment on that. |
| 1:58.9 | So I wanted to share the poem with you with maybe some remarks and some, you know, |
| 2:03.5 | ideas for you to go into the mystery of this poem and let it do some work on you as it keeps doing in me. First of all, the opening stanza describes books |
| 2:11.0 | of poetry, many books and manuscripts of poetry being delivered in wrapped in brown paper. And many |
| 2:17.4 | poems have been written and will be |
| 2:18.8 | written. There's this abundance of books of poetry, this feeling of abundance that we get |
| 2:25.1 | from this first stanza. And yet, the poet seems to draw a contrast between that abundance |
| 2:32.8 | of poetry and an experience of love. And the contrast comes |
| 2:37.7 | with the word but, which begins the second stanza, but we ran ahead of it all. And this implies, |
... |
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