Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:07:28.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

‘Which is the American?’: Themes, Techniques, and Meaning in William Carlos Williams's Three Novels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

John C. Davies
Affiliation:
Bishop Grosseteste College, Lincoln

Extract

In 1928 Ezra Pound described William Carlos Williams as an ‘observant foreigner’ who ‘starts where an European would start if an European were about to write of America: sic: America is a subject of interest, one must inspect it, analyse it, and treat it as subject.’ If Pound was right, Williams was a native-born outsider, a life-long resident alien giving America the serious attention of his life's work. The detachment and close attention noted by Pound as originating in Williams's sense of his own ‘foreignness’ (a sense which Williams obliquely admitted by his insertion of a relevant letter of Pound in the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell), are constants in Williams's work. Both the Imagist and Objectivist phases of his career show his determination to capture in words ‘the local fully realized’ – Williams's definition of ‘the classic’. In his trilogy of novels, his exploration of ‘the local’, ‘the only thing that is universal’ is shown both in theme and technique.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 ‘Dr Williams' Position’, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. Eliot, T. S. (London: Faber, 1954). Pp. 391–2Google Scholar

2 Williams, William Carlos, Imaginations, ed. Schott, Webster (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1970), pp. 1112Google Scholar. (Kora in Hell: Improvisations was originally published in 1920.)

3 The Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), p. 132.Google Scholar

4 Essays, p. 132.

5 The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. Paige, D. D. (London: Faber, 1951), p. 223.Google Scholar

6 Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (2nd ed., New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 207–12.Google Scholar

7 Williams, William Carlos, White Mule (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), p. 241Google Scholar. All references in the text are to this edition.

8 Williams, William Carlos, In the Money (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966), p. 10Google Scholar. All references in the text are to this edition.

9 Williams, William Carlos, I Wanted to Write a Poem: the Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, reported and edited by Heal, Edith (London: Cape, 1967), p. 77.Google Scholar

10 Williams, William Carlos, Paterson Books I–V (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964), pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

11 The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1960), Canto XLV, p. 239.Google Scholar

12 Whitaker, Thomas R., William Carlos Williams (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 110.Google Scholar

13 Williams, William Carlos, The Build-Up (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1969), p. 335Google Scholar. All references in the text are to this edition.

14 Poirier, Richard, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), p. 17.Google Scholar

15 I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 70.

16 Imaginations, p. 158.

17 In the American Grain: Essays by William Carlos Williams (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966), p. 226.Google Scholar

18 Essays, p. 132.

19 Imaginations, p. 140.

20 A World Elsewhere, pp. 12–15.

21 William Carlos Williams, p. 107.

22 Essays, p. 303.

23 Donoghue, Denis, ‘For a Redeeming Language’, William Carlos Williams: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Miller, J. Hillis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 129.Google Scholar

24 James, Henry, The American Scene, 1907 (New York: Horizon Press, 1967), p. 124.Google Scholar

26 Literary Essays, p. 390.