A Rose a Day No.22

The American poet William Carlos Williams wrote in a poem called ‘The Rose’ that begins with the manifesto-like declaration: ‘The rose is obsolete’.  He continued: ‘The rose carried weight of love / but love is at an end – of roses’. In other words, a familiar symbol acts as a barrier to the real, and had to be challenged by the invigorating experience of ‘contact’, or ‘sense’. But while Williams began his poem with the seemingly pessimistic declaration of obsolescence,  he did not in fact claim it was necessary to abandon the rose altogether, but rather that there must be a return to the rose itself, a pruning away of the associations that have attached themselves over time.

Williams was actually directly inspired by this Cubist collage by the Spanish artist Juan Gris from 1914 called ‘Flowers’, which includes pasted-on photographs of roses.  Williams found Gris’ work to be an exemplary model of the modern work of art because, like in Cubism in general, Gris so obviously departed from traditional models through his reductively geometric and abstract structure, the breaking-up of forms into interlocking fragments. Williams concluded: ‘the start is begun / so that to engage roses / becomes a geometry…’. Through the radical rejection of naturalism and realism, painting was renewing itself, and becoming a truly modern art, and along with it, the symbolic rose was also reborn.