Technology and the Rise of the Vernacular Object in William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All

Abstract

| This article examines the representation of objects in American modernist poetry through the work of William Carlos Williams, focusing on his 1923 collection Spring and All. In a time in which commodities rather than natural or handmade objects increasingly came to signify the ethos of everyday life, modernists such as Williams aspired to renovate the aesthetic production of objects. This article tracks Williams’s poetic participation in the larger turn of American avant-garde aesthetics toward vernacular culture. Reading Williams’s often neglected prose-manifesto on aesthetics that frames certain object-poems in Spring and All (e.g., “The Red Wheelbarrow”), this article reveals the historical complexity of Williams’s approach toward poetic realism and technological mimesis, especially concerning the status of the technologically mediated object in vernacular, industrialized culture. This article contends that as the perceived dividing lines between objects and technologies—consumer and capitalist commodities—became inextricably blurred, American modernists like Williams worked through this ambivalence by proposing “vernacular” objects: unstable and ephemeral hybrids of natural and artificial, cultural and material.