Love Poem With Toast

Williams positions himself in a long line of American and English language poets writing in blank verse and free verse. Walt Whitman, often touted as the father of free verse in the US, no doubt had a major influence on Williams’s poetic style and subject matter. Whitman freed his poetics from many of the traditions of his day, including the adherence to form and meter. He embraced open forms of poetry that included long, sprawling lines and themes highlighting both inner and outer struggles—an openness rooted in the optimism Whitman held for a burgeoning America. Whitman also found meaning in the quotidian, so that a leaf of grass becomes an entire poetic/philosophic investigation on time, love, tradition versus independence, and what it means to be human. Whitman, however, sings of the self, a self that looks outward toward some hopefully transformative destiny, and his transcendentalism is such that humankind and nature are not as antagonist toward one another (at least not always) as the relationship between humankind and nature in “Love Poem with Toast.”

Where Whitman might sound a barbaric yawp at the possibilities that destiny (and manifest destiny) might bring about, Williams’s “Love Poem with Toast” underscores just how much fate acts without any thought toward humankind’s whims. For Williams, rainforests die, people contract cancer, one lover dies before another—these are natural inevitabilities from humankind’s encounter with nature and the natural world (Williams himself was a biologist). Fate acts upon us, and we can only “pretend” that we have some say. One of Whitman’s bleaker poems, “I Sit and Look Out,” finds its speaker observing various events and indignities and doing nothing about it. The resignation stems from an inability on the speaker’s part but also an inability due to fate (this poem was written as a reaction to the Civil War’s destruction). The speaker of this poem aligns perhaps the closest to the speaker of “Love Poem with Toast.” Life can be cruel, Williams’s speaker says, and so our pretending is really just an exercise in hoping that things might be different if and/or when indignities come calling. Williams shares Whitman’s use of free verse and blank verse to invoke meaning, and the two also seek out the quotidian, but the poets—or perhaps their speakers—seemingly disagree on fate and manifest destiny to some extent. Again, Williams also ends his poem subtlety enough that one can interpret a sort of grace in pretending and eating toast despite the inevitable.

In addition to Whitman’s open poetics, Ezra Pound and the tenets of Imagism are visible in Williams’s style and approach to poetry. Imagism abandoned the sentiment and grandiosity of Romanticism, favoring simple language, concrete images, and experimentation. William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” is a typical Imagist poem in that it focuses its attention of defining a concrete image (a red wheelbarrow) with simple, direct language. “Love Poem with Toast” also employs simple, direct language throughout the poem. The poem describes eating toast and mentions coffee, an alarm clock, and starting cars (Lines 3-4), all of which are everyday occurrences for many people, with uncomplicated language. In addition to Pound and Imagism, Williams’s poem is in conversation with other literary forebearers: The breadth of his take on the American people, his dedication to concrete images (e.g., non-abstractions), simple language, and establishing his own rhythm puts him in conversation with some of the great Modernist and contemporary poets of his day, including Robert Hayden, Allen Ginsberg, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Bukowski. Moreover, Williams’s background as a biologist and his focus on small town, rural America also puts him in the company of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

Williams’s legacy is carried on by contemporary poets such as a Billy Collins, who was once a student of Williams. Collins writes with similar touches of humor, natural rhythm, and an accessibility in his poetry that has made him popular around the country and world and earned him the Poet Laureate of the US post. Furthermore, the University of Arkansas Creative writing and translation program, which Williams played a huge role in building and running for decades, continues to turn out top-notch poets and translators who follow in the Modernist tradition of poets reading and writing in multiple languages. Also, the journal Williams founded in 1968 at Loyola University in New Orleans, the New Orleans Review, publishes some of the best American poets every year.