William Carlos Williams -

It is a small plant 
delicately branched and 
tapering conically 
to a point, each branch 
and the peak a wire for         
green pods, blind lanterns 
starting upward from 
the stalk each way to 
a pair of prickly edged blue 
flowerets: it is her regard,         
a little plant without leaves, 
a finished thing guarding 
its secret. Blue eyes— 
but there are twenty looks 
in one, alike as forty flowers         
on twenty stems—Blue eyes 
a little closed upon a wish 
achieved and half lost again, 
stemming back, garlanded 
with green sacks of         
satisfaction gone to seed, 
back to a straight stem—if 
one looks into you, trumpets—! 
No. It is the pale hollow of 
desire itself counting         
over and over the moneys of 
a stale achievement. Three 
small lavender imploring tips 
below and above them two 
slender colored arrows         
of disdain with anthers 
between them and 
at the edge of the goblet 
a white lip, to drink from—! 
And summer lifts her look         
forty times over, forty times 
over—namelessly.

-William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest