To be completely honest, I am struggling to decipher exactly what William Carlos Williams is struggling with as a writer. It seems the difficulty of his predicament is precisely because he is a poet not a writer—at least not according to Williams himself.
Williams takes on his literary critics in the first section of Spring and All, and how they consider his work to be “antipoetry.” “Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry” (88). They believe that Williams has not suffered enough—a fitting answer to correlate with his lack of faith. “Jesus, how I love him…but he does not exist” (89). There is such a bravado, a confidence to William’s prose (if it can be called that; I’d opt to call it “prosetry”), especially in the first few pages of the handout that I cannot immediately recognize if Williams’ struggles are with poetry critics, his own demons, the world. He mentions being always on the search for “the beautiful illusion. Williams makes no illusions about how un-beautiful the world is today, going into our evolutionary tendencies to build and destroy. In those moments I cannot help but attribute some of that angst to the pure gloom and doom of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. Granted, Williams approaches the subject a little more tongue-in-cheek. “The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill” (90-91). This personification of imagination seems to be at the heart of William’s message, its inability to be deceived his claim to immortality.
Published in 1922, Spring and All marked Williams’ breakthrough as a writer. According to Neil Myers, “the book makes particularly explicit Williams’ fascination with forms of violence—age, inarticulate pain, frustration, exploitation, urban disintegration, death” (285). I think those sum up some of what Williams’ struggles with as a writer. He seems at once fascinated and terrified of the “terrific confusion” created by our cyclic existence. “Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail?” (97). Williams’ takes solace in the imagination, finds hope in its freedom. Again, the parallels to Eliot are apparent and seemingly convincing, yet in Williams’ find somewhat of an optimist. Cynical and satirical as his prose may be at times, his trust in the imagination does not falter. It rings through; it screams from inside the delicate phrasings of his poetry—the towers of Williams’ soul that must be conquered if not succumbed to.
I believe that Williams’ battles the vagueness of high modernism with the structure of his poetry. As Myers’ attests, “it consists of consciously formal, almost geometrical arrangements of hard-edged things, but it is also full of powerful inward tension, of strongly contrasting elements put together in coherent, graceful patterns under great stress” (285). Williams’ was a product of his generation, and disenchantment with society seemed only natural, but Williams retains focus and a sharp mind, allowing his work to ascend the framework of any movement and carry forth infinitely.
Works Cited
Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations (A New Directions Paperbook).
Myers, Neil. William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All. Modern Language Quarterly. Duke University Press, 1965. pp. 285. http://mlq.dukejournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/26/2/285
