'No ideas but in things' - meaning?

[alana_3501]

Can someone please tell me what (in their opinion) the William Carlos Williams quote 'No ideas but in things' means? Thank you!

[Quizmonster]

Click http://www.millikin.edu/aci/crow/chronology/wcwill
iamsbio.html for a website that gives an answer. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page and you will see the suggestion that poets should concentrate on the physical realities of life rather than on the world of ideas...or words to that effect.

[circlingdogs]

Williams means that poems evoke ideas through the use of sense images, not the other way around. If you simply state your ideas, you will not transform language in the way required to make poetry. For example, if someone writes "I saw him in my imagination," then it's boring, there's not poetry; but when someone insists they saw him in "my mind's eye," a metaphor is created from the image of an eye that creates the idea: mind's eye is the equivalent of imagination, but much more interesting.