William Carlos Williams, Description, and the Avant-Garde

Abstract

For anyone interested in descriptive poetry or the role of the object in twentieth-century poetics, William Carlos Williams seems an obvious starting point. As quondam Imagist, ally of Objectivism, originator of the famous dictum “No ideas but in things” (Paterson 6), and most importantly, as a poet whose oeuvre includes a considerable number of unusually pure descriptive poems, Williams seems poised at the forefront of a modernism of object-hood, the father of an entire poetic lineage devoted to the disinterested investigation of physical reality. But the more one looks at Imagism—“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether objective or subjective”—and Objectivism—“achieving form. That’s what ‘objectivist’ really means”—the less these movements seem to center on an interest in objects qua objects (Pound 3; Oppen 160). Similarly, the more one looks at Williams’s poetics, with its emphasis on voice and the poem as an object (rather than the poem about an object), the less interested—or, at least, the less consistently interested—in real objects he appears. In truth, Williams’s relationship to the physical world is much more complicated than at first it seems, and any attempt to examine his poetics of description and trace its influence on subsequent developments in poetic history will require some delicacy. Later I will address the question of Williams’s historical role. Indeed, this study’s largest gesture will be a rather counterintuitive revision of recent literary history: I will argue that the descriptive mode most uniquely Williams’s own is in fact anathema to the very avant-garde poets—Objectivist, Projectivist, language—we generally consider his heirs. First, however, I need to draw out the