Wednesday, February 18, 2009

While Reading William Carlos William's Autobiography

William Carlos Williams was a physician. From his autobiography I get the sense he was a very good one. He worked long hours saving lives and then he wrote poetry; a lot of poetry. From his autobiography, I gather the poetry informed the medicine and the medicine informed the poetry; just as his friendships informed his poetry or the city of Patterson did. A Jungian would say he lived poetically; just as Heidegger would, who wasn't a Jungian but a philosopher of being and poetry, or better yet as Holderlin wrote and Heidegger explained. The upshot is that poetry is emotion expressed. To live a life of poetry or to live poetically is to express the emotions of being. It is this task which makes people want to be poets; they want to live in the world poetically. So there is the task of being, to be, poetically, in the world of being.

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