The Academy of American Poets
Home | View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become...
More >
FURTHER READING
Ars Poetica
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
All Their Stanzas Look Alike
by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
And It Came to Pass
by C. D. Wright
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica
by Eleanor Wilner
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Art Class
by James Galvin
Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry
by Laurence Lerner
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
Instructions to Be Left Behind
by Marvin Bell
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
On the Subject of Poetry
by W. S. Merwin
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Some Part of the Lyric
by Gregory Orr
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Strawberry on the Drawbridge
by Matthea Harvey
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
The Allure of Forms
by Coral Bracho
The Bargain
by Cyrus Cassells
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Snow and the Plum — II
by Lu Mei-P'o
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Workshop
by Billy Collins
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail 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 - 2008 by The Academy of American Poets.