The Great Figure Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Free VerseWilliams was one of the pioneers of free verse: poetry with no regular rhyme or rhythm. Of course, the problem with a term like "free verse" is that it's defined by what it lacks, not wha...

The speaker is caught totally unawares by the passage of a noisy fire truck. He has kind of a Zen moment right in the middle of the street. We imagine him walking down the street with a thermos of...

"The Great Figure" is probably set in an anonymous big American city in the 1920s. There are lamps on the street, but they are not as bright as the high-powered streetlights you see in cities today...

"The Great Figure" is an example of a poem that sounds like the thing it describes, an effect known as onomatopoeia. Specifically, the poem sounds like the Doppler effect. (Poetry, meet physics.)Yo...

As a title, "The Great Figure" is a big mystery. The noun "figure" can simply mean "number," like when you multiply two figures together in math class. It can also refer to a person's body, like "N...

A Line Can Be A Single WordEnglish teachers love to use poems by William Carlos Williams to show that poetry can be super-short and super-sweet. Williams also wrote some great longer poems, but the...

(2) Sea LevelLike Walt Whitman before him, Williams transformed American poetry by helping to free it from the fancy diction of European literature. "The Great Figure" is meant to provoke clear, in...

Williams's life has been made into a Caldecott Honor children's book called "A River of Words"(source).In his later years, William Carlos Williams became a mentor to Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg....

GNo steaminess here. The word "figure" refers to the number 5, and not a voluptuous body. And all those clanging sirens and rumbling wheels don't really make for a romantic mood.