윌리엄스의 작품에 나타난 에머슨 시학 전통

Abstract

This paper argues that William Carlos Williams’ conceptions of the universe and poetic language show revealing affinities to those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th American transcendental poet. Generally, William Carlos Williams has been known as a poet who renounced private consciousness or romantic ego and leaped into the world of mere “things.” This made him a forerunner of American New Poetics who provided a radical alternative to the poetry of T. S. Eliot in the middle of the 20th century. On the other hand, it also severly limited the real scope of his poetics and created a rather false idealization or underestimation. In fact, there are many more “ideas” in his “things” than he is commonly credited with, as Denise Levertov argues. It is true that he continuously put great emphasis on the “contact” with the local and precise and concrete visualization on the text through various experiments with poetic language. But this was not merely to foreground the visible thing itself, but to “marry” his ‘word’ to the ‘thing’ to get to the nearest reality through the immediate relation between the subject and the object. In this case, the visible thing allows the poet and the reader to get a flash of insight into the invisible thing beyond, which is the essence of the poetics described in Emerson’s Nature and “The Poet.” In fact, Precisionism, a native American avant-garde in the early 20th century, also has some affinities with Emerson. Therefore, this paper first examines the influence of Precisionism on Williams, and then discusses Williams in relation to Emerson’ poetics to read him in a larger American cultural context.