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9 books match the query 'Williams, William Carlos'

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Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics

Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930s

Milton A. Cohen

University of Alabama Press, 2011

A critical examination of modernist poetry and the demands of leftist literary theory.

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and William Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.

Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change.

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Free Verse

An Essay on Prosody

Charles O. Hartman

Northwestern University Press, 1996

To make sense of "free verse" in theory of in practice, the study of prosody—the function of rhythm in poetry—must be revised and rethought. In Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Charles Hartman develops a theory of prosody that includes the most characteristic form of twentieth-century poetry.

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Money and Modernity

Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson

Alec Marsh

University of Alabama Press, 1998

Marsh locates Pound and Williams firmly in the Jeffersonian tradition and examines their epic poems as manifestations of a Jeffersonian ideology in modernist terms.

The modernist poets William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were latter-day Jeffersonians whose politics and poetry were strongly marked by the populism of the late 19th century. They were sharply aware of the social contradictions of modernization and were committed to a highly politicized, often polemical poetry that criticized finance capitalism and its institutions--notably banks--in the strongest terms.

Providing a history of the aesthetics of Jeffersonianism and its collision with modernism in the works of Pound and Williams, Alec Marsh traces "the money question" from the republican period through the 1940s. Marsh can thus read two modernist epics--Pound's Cantos and Williams's Paterson--as the poets hoped they would be read, as attempts to break the hold of "false" financial values on the American imagination.

Marsh argues that Pound's and Williams's similar Jeffersonian outlooks were the direct result of the political battles of the 1890s concerning the meaning of money. Although Pound's interest in money and economics is well known, few people are aware that both poets were active in the Social Credit monetary-reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s, a movement shown by Marsh to have direct links to Jeffersonianism via American populism. Ultimately, the two poets took divergent paths, with Pound swerving toward Italian fascism (as exemplified in his Jefferson and/or Mussolini) and Williams becoming deeply influenced by the American pragmatism of John Dewey. Thus, Marsh concludes, Pound embraced the fascist version of state-capitalism whereas his old friend proclaimed a pragmatic openness to the new selves engendered by corporate capitalism.

Money and Modernity exemplifies the best of recent literary criticism in its incorporation of American studies and cultural studies approaches to bring new insight to modern masterworks.

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Movement and Modernism

Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance

Terri A. Mester

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

In this critical study, Terri Mester makes solid biographic, thematic, technical, and figurative cases that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams turned to dance and dancers—actual and mythic—to reinvigorate their literary practices.

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My Excellency

Comedy in Three Acts

Luis Rechani Agrait

Swan Isle Press, 2025

William Carlos Williams’s “lost” translation of Luis Rechani Agrait’s masterpiece.

William Carlos Williams’s passion for his matrilineal Puerto Rican roots led him to visit Puerto Rico for the first time in 1941. There at a writers’ conference, he befriended the playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, who gave him his play Mi señoría, staged to acclaim the previous year.

My Excellency, as Williams calls the play in his translation, is a political farce set in an “imaginary country” that resembles Puerto Rico during the Great Depression, with its high unemployment and labor unrest. The play focuses on the plight of an idealistic but naive man, Buenaventura Padilla, in a completely corrupt political system. Through an unscrupulous election, he becomes the nation’s leader.

The play is successful as a satire largely because of Buenaventura’s hilarious language—recreated by Williams—with its pompous style combined with stunning malapropisms and clownish errors in history and grammar. The play’s very title is a laughable malapropism. My Excellency shows the corrupting power of success and the tragic flaw of materialism. Driving the comedy in Williams’s translation is his firm command of the play’s dialogue interwoven with popular idioms in which the charm of pure nonsense abounds. This edition is Luis Rechani Agrait’s debut as a playwright in English.

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On The Modernist Long Poem

Margaret Dickie

University of Iowa Press, 1986

Beyond Lionel Trilling's classic definition of Modernism as anticultural and subversive, Margaret Dickie posits American Modernist poetry as both conservative and affirmative—conservative because it was dominated by the composition of the long poem, affirmative because these poems aimed to restore public themes to poetry, to instruct and improve, to "affirm the gold thread in the pattern," as Ezra Pound claimed.

Each poet discussed in this new study—T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound—began his career as an experimenter in brief lyrics and then, paradoxically, developed an ambition to write a long public poem. The poems they wrote—The Waste Land, The Bridge, Paterson, and The Cantos—differed in length, in program, and in composition, but all were alike in their idealization of form, their commitment to the long poem, and the troubled and difficult process of their composition. Read together, they offer a new understanding of the Modernist sense of form shared by these quite different writers.

Tracing the development of each poem from the poet's initial announced plans through the lengthy writing and reconsideration of purpose, Dickie offers a new history not only of each poem but of the American Modernists and the ways they adapted the avant-garde tendencies of European Modernism to their own native needs.

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