American Vernacular: Objectivism, Precisionism, and the Aesthetics of the Machine

Abstract

In 1925 William Carlos Williams published no poems. Nor, apparently, did he write any. Early in the year he did finish work on In the American Grain, which had occupied him for most of 1924, writing the chapter on Poe and the short sketch of Lincoln, and he saw the manuscript through to publication in November. He also wrote, again early in the year, a letter for Aesthete 1925, at the invitation of Malcolm Cowley, taking on H. L. Mencken, whose writing on the American language he would come to admire within a decade, and in the course of the following months he managed a few more essays, notably a piece on Marianne Moore, but there were no poems. In 1926 only six poems appeared, but two had been written in 1910. His first significant collection of poems after Spring and All appeared in the fall of 1928 in Ezra Pound's magazine The Exile. Consisting of twenty-one poems interspersed with eighteen chunks of prose journal, all begun on board the S.S. Pennland in the autumn of 1927 as he was returning from Europe where he had left his family for a year, it was entitled The Descent of Winter, announcing the onset of a new, bleaker poetic season after the earlier advent of Spring and All. This is / winter he incanted in another poem written at the same time (CP1, p. 277). Whereas in Spring and All he had sensed that he was on the edge of