Private avowal, public front: reading Williams’ Kora in Hell

Abstract

ABSTRACTKora in Hell: Improvisations is one of Williams Carlos Williams’ oddest texts, not only because it fits uneasily among his other works but also because it is an insistently private book that Williams took care to circulate publicly. In this essay, I read Kora in Hell’s public performance of privacy as one that invites – indeed requires – an equally and oddly ‘personal’ performance by readers and critics. In the improvisations, I argue, Williams was articulating a poetics of personality at the same moment T.S. Eliot was formulating his influential poetics of impersonality, and I find previously unnoticed points of comparison – and ultimately, contrast – between the two writers. Williams’ poetics of personality also allows us to revisit John Stuart Mill’s famous thoughts on lyric poetry’s privacy and to complicate Michael Warner’s and Virginia Jackson’s recent theorisations of lyric reading and print culture. In the midst of the modernist moment that these theorists might see as the consolidation of lyric privacy, I argue that Williams was seeking a strangely public mode of poetic address.