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THE COMPAKATIST DISCOVERING THE CLASSIC: SHAKESPEARE, T. S. ELIOT, AND WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS José María Rodríguez García William Carlos Williams has often been represented as an unscholarly and unschooled writer who did not appreciate the more intellectual traditions of English verse. This is one of the reasons why he was neglected by the most important canon-makers of the twentieth century: his contemporaries the New Critics. Williams himself was interested in cultivating a maverick, off-center persona; for example, in the autobiographical "Père Sebastian Rasles" (included in In the American Grain [1925]), he recalls an interview in Paris with the French man of letters, Valéry Larbaud: "Who is this man Larbaud who has so little pride that he wishes to talk to me? [. . .] He is a student, I am a block, I thought. I could see it at once: he knows far more of what is written of my world than I. But he is a student while I am—the brutal thing itself (107). Dwelling on the margins oftradition was part ofWilliams's conscious attempt to limit the colonization ofAmerican literature by various strands of European culture, which for the most part were indifferent to American realities and to the possibilities for cultural renewal inherent in an active engagement with the local environment. For this reason, as a writer and occasional critic he took a great interest in authors like Shakespeare , Poe, Whitman, and Pound, whose unconventional and exuberant writing strove (as the imagist motto goes) to "make it new." This is also why throughout his writing career he repeatedly attacked T.S. Eliot, whom he saw as a prodigal Southerner who relinquished his native cultural heritage. Eliot was for Williams a sort of failed twentieth-century successor to Poe in that he too was a learned and self-assured virtuoso but, unlike the author of "The Raven," chose self-exile from America and eventually became the very embodiment ofan orthodox Anglocentric tradition . Eliot's anxiety about the progressive erosion of a universal Christian culture contrasts with Williams's undaunted celebration of the repressed multicultural origins ofAmerican literature. Williams's interest in the paradoxical concept of a modern American "classic," rooted in the local conditions of writing in and about America, began in the wake of massive immigrations of eastern and southern Europeans in the 1910s and early 1920s. The arrival of these peoples spurred debates on the type ofeducation that first-generation Americans should receive at school. Williams's growing awareness ofhis mixed cultural heritage (his father was a British businessman raised in the West Indies, while his mother was Puerto Rican) and his struggle to find his own original voice among a generation of powerful cosmopolitan poets take on additional significance when they are set against the backdrop ofthe debates on school curricula. It was then that he began to think and VcH. 27 (2003): 21 VISCOVEKINQ the classic write about the possible rise of a new classic literature in America, independent of dominant Anglo traditions, just as he fancied that Shakespeare had appeared in Tudor England independently of the humanist traditions of scholarship. Since Williams's concern with the disruptive power of the classic contradicts Eliot's treatment of it as a homogenizing force, I will also bring into my discussion the letter's influential ideas. Between 1928 and 1930 Williams worked intermittently on a fragmentary study called 77ie Embodiment ofKnowledge, composed of short meditations on the topics of education, literature, science, and language.1 One of the recurrent motifs in this posthumous work, published only in 1974, is the characterization of Shakespeare as the creator of a "naturalistic " sensibility to which Williams considered himself an heir. Calling Shakespeare "my grandfather" (110), Williams explains that the Elizabethan playwright was to the classical Renaissance what America was to the Old World: a disruptive and eccentric presence, as yet uncharted in the literary cartographies of the ancients, and one whose freshness can be renewed and preserved by having the reader relate to it existentially rather than academically. At the same time, Williams admits that with Shakespeare a new concept of the classic comes into sight: "He wrote outside the scholarly tradition. One must...

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