This document discusses the influence of photographer Alfred Stieglitz on the poetry of William Carlos Williams. It describes how Stieglitz pioneered photography as an art form in the early 20th century through various galleries and exhibitions in New York City. This exposed Williams to avant-garde visual art and prompted him to move from traditional poetic forms to styles focused more on capturing isolated moments and stripping away narrative elements, inspired by techniques used in paintings and photographs. The document analyzes several of Williams' poems to show how they reflect this shift toward prioritizing visual imagery over storytelling.

1. Let the Image Speak for Itself
Alfred Stieglitz impact on the poetry of William Carlos Williams

2. Alfred Stieglitz
 Born in Hoboken, NJ. 1864
 Moved to Germany for school
 1884 started interest in photography
 First article in 1887 about amature photography In Germany -
lead to more writing/more photos
 Moved to NewYork 1891
 Formed The Camera Club of NewYork- merger of SAP and
NYCC
 1897 Camera Notes
 1902 Photo Secession- exhibition judged only by
Photographers put on by National Arts club- positive feedback
 Lead to Camera work same year- journal of developing
photography as an individual art form

3. Photography as an Art form
 Unlike painting –
photography is
instantaneous
 Must be a seer
 Clear sharp
representation- maximum
detail with maximum
simplification
 Snap shots of NewYork
(1901)
Old and NewYork
1901
Reflections of
Night 1902

4. 291 The Original Modern Art Gallery
 Gallery 291 (1908)- goal
was to showcase different
mediums side by side
 Rodin, Matisse Rousseau,
Cezanne, Picasso
(European)
Minerva date
unknown
Tiger in a Tropical
Storm 1891
Girl with a
Mandolin
1910

5.  Alfred Maurer, John Marin,
Marsden Hartley,Arthur
Dove, MaxWeber
(American)
Painting No. 48, 1913
Brooklyn Bridge 1912
Cow 1914
Interior Fourth Dimension 1914

6. Armory show (1913)
 VP, first official exhibition
of modern art in America
 Most famous and
polarizing: Matisse’s “Blue
Nude (Souvenir de
Biskra)” and “Madras
Rouge (Red Madras
Headdress),”and
Duchamp’s “Nude
Descending a Staircase,
No. 2”
 Impressionist Fauvist and
Cubism were represented

7. Williams Evolution of Style
 Began with Keatsian and
Whitmanian form and
content
 Pound in London 1909-
1910
 Exclamatory then Imagism
 The Tempers (1913)
Poundonian style
 Fascination with visual arts
on NewYork Avant Garde
 Camera work

8.  “The step Williams took
consisted of a progression
from the concept, the
thought, to the poem
itself, just as the painters
following Cezanne began
to talk of the sheer paint:
a picture a matter of
pigments upon a piece of
cloth stretched on a
frame” (Dijkstra 50).
Marcel Duchamp
(Bride 1912)

9. Image as a Subject vs. Metaphor
 Visual space/ tension into Poetry
 Remove narrative sequence of
imagist poems - Story
 Moment of Perception
“Dawn”
 Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
6-Bi8fwakMo
Francis Picabia , Nu
devant un paysage

10. Good Art vs. Bad Art- Williams Lens
 The story cannot overtake
the visual content
 If used must sacrifice the
immediacy and objective
perception of a painting
 Instead suggests artist
should isolate moment of
reality and strip it from all
things nonessential
 Recreating the pure moment
 Example;“Station in a metro
Ezra Pound” (1919) The
apparition of these faces in the
crowd;. Petals on a wet, black
bough.
 Example Williams “Red
Wheelbarrow” So much
depends upon the red
wheelbarrow

11. Creative Imagination- Memory Photos
 Imagination as- “The
undetermined moments
between waking and
sleeping” (53).
 These moments create a
lasting mental photo reel
that refuses the limits of
time and shape.
 Certain aspects of the
original action “become
liquid.” Creating new form
=
Two Figures (1913-14), Liubov'
Popova

12. “Nothing is Good Save the New.”

13. “Danse Russe” (1917)
 If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
again the yellow drawn shades,--
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
Girl with a Mirror-
Henrich Kuehn 1906
Alice Boughton 1909

14. “Queen-Ann’s-Lace” (1921)
Her body is not so white as
anemony petals nor so smooth—nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand’s span
of her whiteness.Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.
Nude against the light
Constant Puyo 1906
Alice Boughton The
Seasons 1909

15. Ignored Relationship
 Letters in 1922 (Yale
Stieglitz file), Marsden
Hartley’s Adventures in the
Arts,
 John Marin Painting
 Cover up in Williams
Autobiography