| In his 1923 poetic manifesto Spring and All, William Carlos Williams explores the creative process of poetry, proposing two key stages: the crystallization of imagination and the dynamization of emotions into a distinct form. This article examines these stages within Williams's concept of "Poem-Work," paralleling Sigmund Freud's "Dream-Work," which explains image formation in dreams through condensation and displacement. Building on Freud's ideas of fragmentation, dream censorship, and allusion, this article argues that imagist poetry reflects specific characteristics after undergoing poem-work. The analysis culminates in a close reading of two contrasting catalogues from Williams's Paterson: one with a meticulously crafted list of flowers and another with a simpler enumeration of daily objects devoid of versification. Using critical perspectives on mimesis, rhythm, and the concept of the Instant in poetry-from sources as varied as Aristotle's Poetics and Ezra Pound's "A Retrospect"-this article highlights how these catalogues embody Williams's poetic vision, transcending traditional forms.
This article addresses the question of stylistic transformation in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, examining the role of the concordance and, more recently, natural language processing, as tools for use in the course of stylometric analysis, and presenting Williams as an ideal candidate for consideration and comparison of early and late styles, giving due attention to Williams's formative literary influences, the influence of the visual arts more generally, and Williams's grammatical tendencies regarding adverbs, articles, conjunctions, and pronouns, both with reference to poetic peers and across his early and late work, with special attention devoted to poems including "This Is Just to Say" (1934) and "The Ivy Crown" (1955). In contesting the critical tendencies to demean or to minimize Williams's stylistic shifts, this article addresses a number of significant and substantial transformations in Williams's poetics, tracing them to specific aesthetic commitments and biographical circumstances, and hailing Williams as a disruptive figure who stood as a key innovator not only in early career, but also in late career, unafraid to change, or to be influenced by younger poets, and whose culminating disruption was to disrupt the prevailing modernist preference for disruption.
| This article seeks to mobilize Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of perception-more specifically, his contention that imbrication in a knowledge relationship with the perceived object precedes registration of the percept in consciousness-toward reconceiving some stale debates in Williams studies, namely: what is meant by the famous dictum, "No ideas but in things." For Williams, this statement does not mean placing poetic priority on objects, particulars, or concrete reality. Instead, ideas and things exist in a relationship that is itself ontologically prior to either things or ideas. Proprioception, an embodied form of knowledge that does not require conscious awareness, becomes a crucial tool for interpreting Williams's ostensibly object-centered shorter poems, which this article suggests dramatize a critique of the subject/object distinction by portraying perception without a perceiver. This philosophical framework serves to deepen the possibilities of engagement with deceptively simple poems, and to argue for the philosophical complexity of Williams's poetry more broadly.
| A twenty-year-old Allen Ginsberg published a review of William Carlos Williams's Paterson Book One in a local New Jersey newspaper in 1946. Reprinting the review as an appendix here sheds light on, and raises questions about, the beginning of the relationship between Williams and Ginsberg, which would go through many vicissitudes in the following years. It also provides an occasion for reflecting on the reception of Williams's poem by the citizens of Paterson, among whom Ginsberg somewhat uncomfortably counted himself. Ginsberg's discomfort was part of a larger struggle to find his own voice as a writer, a struggle that Williams's example helped him resolve.
T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams formed one of the more interesting literary rivalries of the modernist period, and their two most influential projects, The Waste Land and Spring and All, respectively, are key indicators of their aesthetic differences. This article seeks to show how bringing these two projects in conjunction under the umbrella of “symbolism” can demonstrate how there are two distinct temporalities underlying their projects, with The Waste Land’s symbolism representing a traditional, spatial conception of time that Eliot navigates through his idea of demonstrating how “tradition” can apply to the present, whereas Spring and All counters this conception with something more reminiscent of Henri Bergson’s la durée: a concept that aligns more with process philosophy in the sense that time is also rooted in sensation and experience. This article will show how Eliot’s characters embody tradition while Williams avoids it in order to fully emphasize the possibilities existing within the “moment.” Moreover, it considers how these aesthetic choices represent their particular brands of modernism and how they position the reader in relation to their poetry.
William Carlos Williams has often been regarded as a prototypical modern elegist, stripping sentimentality from poetic treatments of death. Similarly, his training in the emerging field of modern scientific medicine has led scholars to focus on his so-called “clinical” or “objective” style. Yet a more complex picture emerges from elegiac poems he wrote for his paternal grandmother and mother. Many of these poems were written while their subject was still alive and therefore have not been read as elegies. Yet these preemptive or anticipatory elegies draw on traditional tropes of pastoral elegy, while also critiquing modern medical approaches to end-of-life treatment. In the process, these poems form a new subgenre of elegy made possible by medical advances that lengthened lifespans in the twentieth century, while at the same time sharing the ethics of care over cure that would motivate hospice reformers such as Dame Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the decades after the poems appeared. While medical humanities sometimes treat literary texts as instruments for establishing standards of medical ethics and empathy, attention to these poems should encourage us to reverse that approach and instead understand medical humanist texts as expressing ethical lessons that emerge from the hands-on practice of medical professionals themselves.
This article contends that the city of Paterson, New Jersey, is more than a convenient backdrop for Williams’s epic poem Paterson. The relationship between city and poem is one of “neighboring”: a word that names both a geographic and a philosophical dynamic of proximity and distance. In charting this relationship of neighboring, the article also recovers the poem’s philosophical and ecological stakes—both of which are often overlooked. Paterson models a relationship to the more-than-human environment that upends philosophical dualisms and that requires proximity while refusing mastery.
William Carlos Williams’s The Great American Novel challenges readers’ expectations about the purpose and structure of a modern novel. Williams asks us to think about what is “great” and what is “novel” in American literature as he draws upon a variety of references and voices. This article examines one of those references—the narrator’s foggy ride home from the Bergen County Mosquito Extermination Commission. Williams’s direct mention of the commission highlights his active involvement with a pioneering ecological effort in New Jersey to combat mosquito infestation. In support of the cause, Williams served as the Bergen County commission’s secretary from 1916 into the 1930s. It is through this service that he learned invaluable lessons about the difficulty of making progress in this type of work. Since progress is a key word in The Great American Novel, this article considers the ways that Williams’s work on the commission, including papers he delivered at its annual meetings, informs his representation of progress and modernity in this experimental novel.
| "The Use of Force," a vignette by William Carlos Williams, frequently appears in medical humanities syllabi. The story Williams tells in the vignette, about a physician's violent encounter with a child he has been called to examine for possible diphtheria, is disturbing. The physician-narrator has murderous thoughts about his young patient and his "use of force" in roughly prying open her mouth suggests child abuse and even rape. Why, given the ugly content of this piece, is it so frequently used to train doctors and future doctors? An exploration of Williams's career as a writer and as a physician as well as a close reading of the text may provide some answers.
| In this article, William's story "The Use of Force" is viewed through the analytical lens of "Viewpoints," a theatrical performance technique originally developed in the 1970s by artist and educator Mary Overlie. When taught alongside performative texts such as "The Use of Force," Viewpoints emerges as an important teaching tool for medical students as they navigate professionalism, self-reflexivity, and their place in space and time. Following a reading of Williams's story, the article discusses its direct application in medical education for schools that emphasize a humanistic approach to patient care.
| This article argues that as a physician-poet Dr. Williams approaches his poetic material very much as he approaches his patients, and that the form of Paterson in particular is intentionally and actually reminiscent of the various forms taken by the medical case narrative, or "work up."
Although ambiguity and an interest in the contemporary modern art scene have long been recognized as playing major roles in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, the same influences have not been sufficiently appreciated in his short fiction. This article begins with a brief review of the subject and definition of ambiguity and then analyzes its presence in The Farmers' Daughters, Williams's 1961 collection of short stories. The article closes with some thoughts on possible causes of his conflicted writing and resulting ambiguity, in both poetry and prose, and briefly discusses the ethical criticism of the ambiguous sexual (in)appropriateness of the physician-female patient relationship in these stories.
Abstract This article revisits a talk at a William Carlos Williams panel that would come to have a major impact on discussions of poetry and poetics, but which also made clear the problematic critical divide between the Williams of the short lyric and the Williams of genre-defying, experimental work, such as Spring and All. The panel took place at the 1983 MLA Convention in New York City, and the speaker was Charles Bernstein. This introductory article to this special issue discusses the original event as well as the talk itself—“The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA”—which has since been published in essay form. In addition, this introduction considers the lasting importance of Spring and All, which was also the topic of a 2023 MLA Williams panel in which Bernstein participated with Bob Perelman and Juliana Spahr to provide their perspectives on the 100th anniversary of Spring and All and the fortieth anniversary of “The Academy in Peril.”
This article works through an examination of Bob Perelman's poems in relation to major Williamsian defining features of the poet, poetic language, and poetics, and asks: Is there a way to recover from a modernist past that has become enshrined and canonized? How to relate to the bewildering inventiveness, as it sometimes walks hand in hand with a stupefying dogmatism? Developing a form of poetic activism over a span of more than fifty years, Perelman has shown growing interest in Williams's work, the poems and the essays, as possible matrixes for a poetic practice that encompasses the preoccupation with language, the intermedial awareness of the poem's interactions with the visual, and the ethical commitment to a political and philosophical discourse on the human.
This article is a response to Charles Bernstein's "The Academy in Peril," the essay in which he first uses the term "official verse culture." Using Williams's convoluted history with leftist magazines in the 1930s and 1940s as an example, it both agrees with Bernstein about their being an official verse and also points to how verse that is often unofficial is also official. It concludes with the author reflecting on poetry's embeddedness in higher education and what that means for the future.
Recollections of the author’s 1983 speech on Williams at the MLA Annual Convention led to a critique of his formulation of “official verse culture” with special reference to Randall Jarrell. Are there “sides” in modernist and contemporary American poetry? Some poets seem to be embraced by “both sides” (including, but not at all times, Williams), while others, equally significant, are not. Cultural homogeneity, often unconscious, works against aesthetically necessary diversity. In 1983, as well as in this work, the author employed rhetorical strategies for poetic ends, or possibly vice versa. A strong argument is made for Williams not only as a great poet but a supernal—indeed foundational—thinker for modernist and contemporary poetics.
