Title: Ideas in things : the poems of William Carlos Williams /
Authors: Markos, Donald W., 1933-
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1994
Subjects: Williams, William Carlos, Criticism and interpretation.
Abstract: William Carlos Williams' optimism, a counter-current to prevailing twentieth-century pessimism, was more than a matter of temperament. It was grounded in American transcendentalism and English romanticism but expressed in a semi-opaque modernist style - disjunctive, imagistic, symbolic, and both suave and colloquial. Williams' optimism, along with his outgoing contact with people and things, was an essential ingredient of the visionary idealism that was nurtured by Emerson, Whitman, the English romantics, and other sources. Ideas in Things establishes that Williams' worldview is grounded in these sources (Coleridge, Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Whitman, and especially Emerson), and describes the organic-idealist assumptions that underlie Williams' poetry. Williams' vision of organic unity undercuts the alienating dualism that has prevailed since Descartes and the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^
Contents: 1. Williams: a visionary poet -- 2. Overcoming dualism -- 3. Language and the renewal of perception -- 4. The imagination: a force of nature -- 5. Nature: an overview of organicism -- 6. The late years and the legacy.