Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
Poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright William Carlos Williams is often said to have been one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement...
More >
Want more poems?
Subscribe to our
Poem-A-Day emails.
FURTHER READING
Poems about Poetry
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Art of Poetry [excerpt]
by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Composition of the Text
by Adriano Spatola
The Difference between a Child and a Poem
by Michael Blumenthal
The Indications [excerpt]
by Walt Whitman
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Sponsor a Poet Page | Add to Notebook | Email to Friend | Print

The Uses of Poetry

 
by William Carlos Williams

I've fond anticipation of a day
O'erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay,

Hid deep in rushes, where at random play
The glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frighted with our boat's long sway.

For, lest o'ersaddened by such woes as spring
To rural peace from our meek onward trend,
What else more fit? We'll draw the latch-string

And close the door of sense; then satiate wend,
On poesy's transforming giant wing,
To worlds afar whose fruits all anguish mend.









First published in Poems (1909).
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2013 by Academy of American Poets.