William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition by Peter Schmidt (review)

126Rocky Mountain Review PETER SCHMIDT. William Carlos Williams, the Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. 268 p. In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams described the American artistic climate during the early years of his poetic development: "There was at that time a great surge of interest in the arts generally before the First World War. New York was seething with it. Painting took the lead. It came to a head for us in the famous 'Armory Show' of 1913" (New York: Random House, 1951, 134). Williams' contacts with contemporary American and European artists have been documented and explored in a number of fine studies of his life and poetry, most notably in Bram Dijkstra's pioneering study The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Dickran Tashjian's Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910-1925, recent books by William Marling, Henry Sayre, and Christopher MacGowan, and Paul Mariani's biography William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. Taking full advantage ofprevious scholarship, Peter Schmidt not only extends our appreciation ofthe effects of Precisionism, Cubism, and Dada on Williams' verse as it evolved from 1913 to 1963, he also situates Williams in a variety of literary traditions. Arguing that each "influence from the visual arts ... led Williams back to a specific literary tradition, to particular authors and literary modes" (8), Schmidt traces the convergence of Precisionism with Williams' rethinking of the pastoral, of Cubism with his revitalization of the sublime ode, of Dada with his experiments with automatic writing and his understanding of American transcendentalism, and of Cubist and Dadaist collage with his transformation of the epic. Schmidt writes: "What is now needed are explorations of how even during the decade in which Williams wrote Spring and All he sought to integrate ideas from the visual arts with what in 1939 he called a 'usable past'—the full range ofboth American and European literary tradition. Accordingly, in this book I argue that in general Williams used the inspiration he gained from the arts not to write poems about pictures or even to create a visual poetics, but to return to and renew specifically literary traditions and modes" (7). Williams' interest in the Precisionists, among them the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the painters Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, coincided with his celebration of the American tradition, his fascination with modern industrial technology, and his experiments with urban pastoral. Schmidt suggests that the Precisionists exerted "the most pervasive and long-lasting of all visual arts influences" on Williams (10), particularly because of their efforts to work in a native American idiom freed from the European past. The clarity, precision, sharp focus, and expressive but universal point of view of the Precisionist paintings and photographs took Williams well beyond Imagism in his poetry, and contributed to his rediscovery of the American transcendentalist heritage. Cultivating an Emersonian innocence and originality of vision, the Precisionists strove to capture "the lineaments of the spiritual as well as the material" in the natural world (24), and to realize an "idealized Arcadian vision of modern industry" not unlike Emerson's and Book Reviews127 Whitman's (32). Schmidt persuasively delineates the complex interplay between European pastoral and Emersonian idealism in William's urban poems and nature lyrics. The tenets of Cubism, particularly as they were introduced to American artists by de Zayas, Apollinaire, and Gleizes in such little magazines as 291 and The Little Review, inspired Williams throughout his career to experiment with polyphony, fragmentation, quotation, and collage, and to rethink the literary traditions of the ode and the epic. While Williams' later transformations ofthe ode are more self-conscious and openly allusive, Schmidt argues, his lyrics ofthe teens and twenties already display the "effusive style, contrasting voices, and elevated subject matter" of the sublime ode (80). Exploring the possibilities of Cubist collage, Williams extended his use of "found objects" from his Cubist odes to Paterson. The playfulness, pessimism, and subversive ironies ofDada inspired Williams' improvisatory experiments with automatic writing in Kara in Hell and in the poems ofthe decade that followed, and also left their mark on Paterson, which Schmidt reads as the...