William Carlos Williams and the environment of modern poetry

This dissertation begins with the question of modernity. Because modern poetry must be a kind of literary genre that reflects the diverse sociocultural aspects of its age, the question of modern poetry can not be separated from the ideology of modernism. To begin, I argue that Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams assume dialectical roles within the polemics of modern poetry. Chapter two focuses specifically on the bitter dispute between Stevens and Williams over the role of metaphor because the history of lyric poetry has been deeply embedded in the notion of metaphor. I maintain that the romantic metaphor emerges from its encounter with metaphysics that was the most dominant trend of Western thinking during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And, based on de Manian reading of allegory, I explore the matter of how the Victorian poetry, both in the development of Wordsworthian poetry and as a precursor to twentieth century poetry, broke from the Symbolist Weltanschauung and exhibited a marked tendency to doubt the role of metaphor that was emphasized in Symbolist poetics. Chapter three holds that the image, as a central trope of modernity, is positioned as both subject and object commonly in the historiographic narrative of Benjamin and Williams. I claim that Benjamin's definition of literature as "an organon of history" is echoed in the words of Williams who, by means of quotidian objects, attempts to read the compulsions of mythic forces and capture the underlying spirit of the epoch. Chapter four shows how Williams discovered important sources of inspiration in the revolutionary avant-garde movements from Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism to Dada and Surrealism and attempted to apply their innovations to his own poetic needs. I argue that Williams' notion of literary production concurs in many ways with that of Benjamin. Chapter five claims that the New American poets including the Black Mountain poets, the New York poets, the San Francisco poets and the Objectivist poets followed Williams in denouncing the exclusive aesthetics of High Modernism. And I discuss how the aesthetics of Williams' poetry has become the origin of the poetic mode of American postmodernist poetry.