This book examines the achievements of William Carlos Williams in the context of the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thorgau and Walt Whitman. The author develops a narrative of sensibilities to enrich the understanding of transcendentalism.
An invaluable introductory guide for students, this Companion features thirteen new essays from leading international experts on William Carlos Williams, covering his major poetry and prose works. It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and considers his relationships with contemporaries as well as the importance of his legacy.
Modernism: An Anthology is the most comprehensive anthology of Anglo-American modernism ever to be published. Amply represents the giants of modernism - James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Samuel Beckett. Includes a generous selection of Continental texts, enabling readers to trace modernism’s dialogue with the Futurists, the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and the Frankfurt School. Supported by helpful annotations, and an extensive bibliography. Allows readers to encounter anew the extraordinary revolution in language that transformed the aesthetics of the modern world .
Introduction: A life that is here and now -- Growth of a poet's mind -- The disjointing process, Kora in hell: improvisation -- Getting from sentiment to form -- Painting the wind -- A renaissance twilight with triphammers -- Imagining America -- A new order of knowing -- The verse line -- Form, structure, and vernacular
Placing the philosopher John Dewey and the poet William Carlos Williams together—two important figures of twentieth-century American culture—this book examines the ambitions and failings of progressive liberal culture during the first half of the twentieth century. This book shows that, while their work ostensibly shares little in common, Williams and Dewey share the ambition to realize the radical potential of a democratic cultural politics. Including close readings of texts like Williams's Spring and All, In the American Grain, and Paterson, and Dewey's Individualism Old and New and Art as Experience, Beck offers an important contribution to current debates over the relationship between politics and cultural production.
Brian Bremen's innovative re-examination of William Carlos Williams's life and work traces the development of Williams's poetics, focusing in particular on his ongoing fascination with the effects of poetry and prose. In an analysis informed by the insight of contemporary cultural critics, Bremen traces Williams's thought from the confused romanticism of Spring and All to the methodological empiricism of Paterson, examining in the process Williams's correspondence with life-long friend Kenneth Burke and their shared theoretical interests. Through this fresh conceptual frame-work, Bremen shows how Williams's role as poet becomes more congruous with his role as doctor. In addition, Bremen looks closely at Williams's economic and social theories in light of those of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, making a case for the consistency of Williams's thought on medicine, gender, economics, poetry and prose, and history. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture is essential reading for scholars not only of Williams, but also of Modernism, twentieth-century literature, and cultural criticism and history.
Reader's Guide Literature in English provides expert guidance to, and critical analysis of, the vast number of books available within the subject of English literature, from Anglo-Saxon times to the current American, British and Commonwealth scene. It is designed to help students, teachers and librarians choose the most appropriate books for research and study.
The poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) espoused the ideal that true poetry is rooted in the details of everyday life. He developed the technique of the variable foot, expressing the cadences and rhythms of speech which are documented in this text.