Williams, Nostalgia, and Modernity

| The article reads Williams’s approach to the past in line with the concept of a reflective nostalgia, as coined by Svetlana Boym, with the aim of adding to our understanding of modernist reflection on time and temporality. Williams is, famously, a poet of the moment, but at the same time his poetics drives on the desire to return to a beginning, whether this takes the form of a personal stripping down, the invocation of a cosmic spring, or the digging for a historical ground. The articles focuses on two of Williams’s backward-looking projects, In the American Grain and “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower,” and read them in line with two philosophical projects that can be seen to bookend modernism: Nietzsche’s “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and Bruno Latour’s “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” Williams’s poetic trajectory takes us from a vitalist forgetting to a compositionist project in tune with contemporary reconfigurations of the make-it-new imperative.