From Romanticism To Localism

In the early period of 20th century, William Carlos Williams lived in the brilliance of his contemporaries: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. At a time when Eliot achieved international success and the return to "tradition" in poetry became a fashion, Williams still persisted in seeing America as the place where his poetry should be rooted. Williams' poetry is more expressive of American sensibility and more saturated with American speech and American rhythms than any poet since Whitman. Gradually, Williams emerged as one of the great force in twentieth-century American verse. Williams was well-known for his versatile styles of poetry. He started his poetic career as a romanticist, a loyal disciple of Whitman and then a representative of imagism, and American localist as well as a modernist. If we examine the poetic career of Williams, it is not difficult to find two pioneers decisively important to him: John Keats and Walt Whitman. On the one hand, Williams accepted the influences of them; on the other hand, he tried to shake free from their influence by unceasing alteration of styles. In 1973, the literary theorist Harold Bloom published his new study The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. In this book, Bloom explored the psychology of influence, and concluded that it was conflict of Oedipal dimensions between the poet and their literary forbearers. It is the struggle of the artist, Bloom argued, to find their own voice through an ambivalent anxiety-ridden relation precisely with those precursors whom they most admire. Through creative misinterpretations of these shadowy figures, the artist, in the very act of considering certain past artists as admired precursors, also imagines them as incomplete, failing for all their genius, and failing short of the mark that only the present artist is capable of reaching. Admiration therefore necessarily becomes accusation, and the present artist only discovers their own power by distorting, demonizing, and then devouring those influences that their loves so much. Originality is achieved in the misinterpretation of the precursor as incomplete, which allows one to write the past according to one's own agenda, that is, to influence (in imagination) one's precursors instead of letting them influence one who writes them. One unconsciously takes credit for their work and completes their failed intentions in one's own work. The intention of this paper is to use Bloom's theory of influence to expound the poetical development of Williams' poetry from Romanticism to modern localism. The poetical development of Williams from a Romanticist to a modern localist was also a process in which he managed to overcome the influence of his pioneers and a process from a new hand to a strong poet. Fascinated by the exquisiteness of feeling and melancholy of form of Keats, Williams started his poetical career by imitating Keats and writing romantic verse. But with the failure of Poems and abortion of Philip and Oradie, Williams had been in fact in a situation of predicament. Like son oppressed by father, Williams lived anxiously in the shadow of Keats. As a forbearer, Keats first occupied a temporal priority in poetry, for which Williams was too inferior to bear comparison. And Keats' talent and achievements were another factor to make Williams feel oppressed. In order to find his own voice, he managed to swerve away from the influence of Keats. As he mentioned in his autobiography, it was Whitman who helped Williams break through the barrier of constraint of Keats. Williams followed Whitman into American themes and details and patterned organization. Wanderer is a good example of such imitation. But with the time going on, Williams anxiously diverged from Whitman again. On the one hand, Williams' attitude to Whitman shifted from the early enthusiasm to his mature appraisal of Whitman centering on Whitman's applicability in local form; on the other hand, he began to swerve away from Whitman by doubting Whitman's talent or, as Harold Bloom put it, "clinamon" (denial of pioneers'...