The Representation And Furtherance Of Williams’ Objectivist Poetics

As a previous Imagist and a pioneer of Objectivism, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is viewed as one of the greatest poets in modern American poetry and one of the central figures during the transformation of the Western poetry from modernity to post-modernity. Williams seems poised at the forefront of modernism of object-hood, the father of an entire poetic lineage devoted to the distinguished investigation of physical reality. While creating new poems, Williams focuses on objects and events encountered in real life. Based on the principles of "sincerity and objectification", Williams put forward his famous dictum, "No ideas but in things". Some of Williams’lyrical poems are the direct presentations of the ordinary people, the familiar and immediate experience, and the senses around him without any comment. Compared with Williams, Philip Whalen (1923-2002), one of the most famous San Francisco Renaissance poets in the 1950s, is a major voice of American Zen Buddhist poets. Whalen’s poems are endowed with special oriental aesthetics of Zen and an insular living attitude free from utilitarianism. Whalen characterizes his poetry as "a picture or a graph of mind moving". In the producing of his works, Whalen paid a great attention to Zen and visual aesthetics, which possesses individual and social dimensions with both literary and spiritual brilliance. Whalen’s poems, which are full of oriental aroma, compromised the beauty of zen and painting.Through the reading and analyzing of the whole collection of Whalen’s poems, the author explores Philip Whalen’s Buddhist poetry & poetics from the following two aspects:the representation and the furtherance of his predecessor, W. C. Williams’Objectivist poetics, in the hope of revealing Philip Whalen’s unique Zen poetic thoughts and the great influences he has made on the development of American modern and post-modern poetry. This thesis is mainly concerned with two points:first of all, through a comparative study, this paper takes a critical look at the internal relationship between Philip Whalen and W. C. Williams, and distinguishes Whalen’s works and thoughts from Williams’Objectivist poetics, in order to reveal how Whalen inherits the experience of Williams and how he distinguishes Buddhist poetics from Objectivist poetics. Secondly, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of Philip Whalen’s significant contributions to American Zen Buddhist poetry and his important role in unifying of cultures between the East and the West.This thesis is composed of six parts, namely, an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, in the hope of exploring the similarities and differences between Whalen’s Buddhist poetics and Williams’Objectivist poetics, in order to reveal how poets made distinctions between Zen Buddhist and objectivist philosophy, or, similarly, how they began to critique Zen as a cultural fashion.The first part is a brief introduction to Philip Whalen and The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen. Chapter One, then, includes a detailed presentation of the previous researches both at home and abroad. Significance of the thesis is included as well. Chapter Two is mainly devoted to a thorough exploration and interpretation of Williams and his pursuit for "New Measures", as well as the evolutionary process of Williams’poetics from Imagism to Objectivist Poetics, which gives readers the reason why Williams has made great influence upon Philip Whalen.The next two chapters make the main body of the whole thesis. Chapter Three intends to explore the Objectivist Poetics thoughts represented in Whalen’s Buddhist poems from the following two aspects:"Sincerity" and "Objectification". The "Sincerity" part deals with Whalen’s three ways of experiencing the real through Zen Philosophy, including "No Ideas But in Things", the reality of haiku, as well as live American speech. Then, the "Objectification" part focuses on Whalen’s visual poetry, that is, his painting visual poetry and semantic iconic poetry. In this chapter, the features assimilated from Williams’poetics will be attentively analyzed; and many poems will be intensively interpreted, stanza by stanza. Particularly, there will be some pictures and graphs to exhibit vividly the visual poems of Whalen’s. Chapter Four, on the contrary, focuses on Whalen’s variations and furtherance of Williams’Objectivist Poetics. This section mainly deals with the following three perspectives with the help of Daisetz T. Suzuki’s (1970) Zen philosophy and the explanation of Language Poems that Charles Bernstein has advanced:(1) Whalen’s Religion-literary Practice, that is, from Objective poetics to Zen poetics, (2) Whalen’s deeper preoccupation with Eastern world, (3) poetic features of Whalen’s "Language poetry".The conclusion part sums up the whole thesis and explains the significance of this research. This kind of structure setting enables readers to get a whole picture of the developing process of Whalen’s poetic thoughts.