Literary Tradition and True Americanism: Exemplified in W. C. Williams’s Spring and All and Paterson

Abstract

Unlike American expatriates in Europe, William Carlos Williams stayed in his native land for his lifetime and tried to build a new poetic tradition based on the American soil and culture. He was interested in a poetic at once genuinely American and modern. He saw that the age-old European literary tradition and its followers were impediments to his effort to represent American reality and its people. His insistence on Americanism led him to stick to the local area of New Jersey visiting frequently Museums and art galleries in New York and learning American history and its literary predecessors. His new poetics resembles the ideas of American pioneers. Through his poetry and other forms of writing he broke with as many literary conventions of English inheritance as possible. Using unconventional ways of poetry in every possible way, he combined unrelated elements as if inventing new commodities for daily use. By using speech rhythms and taking subjects from unlimited sources of everyday life he brought down poetry from the high-minded intellectual possession to the common people. Through the poet’s imagination and revolutionary combination a new poetic reality was created. The value of his poetic experiment is being increased as more people find his love and endeavour represented in his writing. This paper examines the meaning of tradition to Williams and the limitations one’s blind sticking to literary convention can bring about. Williams’s revolutionary poetics represented in his poems, especially in Spring and All and his famous Paterson, is examined.