Tract" by William Carlos Williams

Throughout the poem, Williams uses free verse, which results in "Tract" reading more like prose than traditional poetry. This is one of the main concerns Williams an other modern poets had with creating their work. They were concerned with creating new forms of creating art an poetry. A sense of poetic evolution is at the heart of this type of art. In his essay, William Carlos Williams speaks of "dissimilarity to all other things" that should be pervasive in all new forms of poetry for it to have any value beyond imitating existing forms (Williams, p. 347).

This is then also Williams' ideal in using the element of fragmentation. In the first stanza of "Tract," the speaker begins logically enough, with an apparent wish to teach the townspeople about conducting funerals. Then, suddenly, he refers to a troop of artists. After this line, the second-last...
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