Though it’s unquestionably a great place to learn what new abhorrent racial epithets are trending, Twitter isn’t often thought of as a place to learn about early 20th-century poetry. But recently, a number of users have rediscovered the seminal work “This Is Just To Say” by American poet William Carlos Williams and have been discussing the piece with reverence, attempting to analyze how the imagist movement of the 1930s impacted future generations of poets.
Just kidding. They’ve been turning it into crappy song lyrics.
There’s something about the simple and succinct verse of Williams’ poem, combined with the fact that it’s about something as trivial as plum theft, that just makes the words scream out and say, “Put me to the rhythm of Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star!’” So, of course, the internet obliges.
William Carlos Williams, who died in 1963, would no doubt have trouble understanding what a meme or Twitter or the internet even is, but he’d hopefully take comfort knowing that his words are living on, decades after his death, in a parody version of “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers. At the very least, his art is giving people a break from their busy schedules so they can indulge in some well-earned procrastination.