[The world of art] is battleground, not bland Elysium, but at the same time we will realize that the battle is taking place within world that can and does contain it. It is battleground where differences of emotional and intellectual opinion may be engaged to the enhancement of the soul. It is battleground where men contend to enlarge their vision and to refresh and engage their minds and emo- tions. From which, or by virtue of whose works, the man of affairs, if he give them the play they merit, may draw refreshment and power.-William Carlos Williams (RI 92)We've got to on the major line of attack. It's an attack. Drill it into them. It's an attack.Don't forget the lessons to be learned, still to be learned from the methods of Gen. Patton during the last war.-William Carlos Williams to Richard Rubenstein (April 29, 1950)1Have been batting away at the Rhetoric. (It will become, I guess, study devoted to showing how deep and ubiquitous are the roots of war the universal scene and the human psyche-a study extending from our meditations on the war of words.)-Kenneth Burke to William Carlos Williams, Nov. 19, 1945. (89) wO bald men fighting over comb. That was Jorge Luis Borges's succinct summary of the war between Argentina and England over the islands the British call the Falklands and the Argentines call the Malvinas. Borges's jest recalls Henry Kissinger's comment that the battles among academics are so bitter because so little is at stake. And yet, this was not always the case. During the Second World War, some academics called for great shake-up that, had it been successful, might have eliminated the liberal arts and humanities as we know them from advanced education. You might ex- pect William Carlos Williams to have been strong supporter of the liberal arts such time, but he had such strong animus against academics, and was himself so notoriously undervalued by academics until the last decade of his life, that dur- ing the war he saw them as his enemies the battle for American culture.In fact, the volcano metaphor he used for the Second World War's catastrophic energies Catastrophic Birth (a poem to be discussed later) was anticipated few years earlier an essay titled Let us order our world, which the volcano is depicted as necessary to dislodge those scholars who were doing a dig- ging in, trying to keep their establishment unaltered by anything that has taken place from peace to peace [ . . . ]. We should thereforeimaginatively conceiv[e] the war as great volcano of nascent and un- aligned values to be recombined better, more humane, more politi- cally satisfactory order than ever before the history of the world. [. . . . ] For good must be brought out of every convulsion of the world if we are men of imagination-by which we live. (Williams 21)The world-wide convulsion of the Second World War was an opportunity to break up old oppressive orders and create new order, but-despite his political rhetoric-by this he didn't mean replacing fascism with democracy, but rather replacing of traditional metrics with avant-garde forms of ordering the poem. As we will see, Williams's loyalty to the cause of the avant-garde was extreme enough that he showed little sympathy for those academics he saw engaged covert digging, even if it meant that they were to be gassed out of their trenches the universities by wartime shift of values toward practical education. For Williams, the poem must be reinvented as both practical and impractical, both machine and flower, order to save us from dehumanized machine consciousness that he associates with both the Germans and the Academy.1. The Defense of the AcademyIf there was such digging in as Williams feared, it seems that it was more overt than covert, vocal reaction to ways which the volcano-like upheaval of the war threatened the academic tradition of the liberal arts the United States. …
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Jan 1, 2014
Riccardo Manzotti + 1
Open Access
