Art and Suffering in Two Late Poems by William Carlos Williams

This essay considers two poems written in the aftermath of William Carlos Williams's devastating strokes of 1951 and 1952. Reading the poems-"To a Dog Injured in the Street" and "The Yellow Flower"-as late entries in Williams's long negotiation of human suffering, ethical responsibility, and poetic will, I look at how they struggle under the burdens of illness and old age to make sense of suffering and to reconcile it with the aims and measures of art. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's understanding of Williams's writing and on the theory of language as symbolic action that Burke develops during their formative friendship, I consider both the aptness of Burke's reasoning and its limitations in addressing bodily suffering. I then turn to Elaine Scarry's reading of the body in pain as a way of understanding the dynamic of illness and imagination these late poems.