William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, and the Anthropological Imaginary

This essay examines the contexts of an "anthropological imaginary" that inform a close reading of William Carlos Williams's Spring and All (1923). It seeks to expand the associations of modernism and anthropology from the typical conflation of these terms with the poetry of T.S. Eliot and anthropologist James Frazer by linking Williams's interests with Franz Boas, the most established anthropologist in the United States at the time. Williams's focus on the local is similar to Boas's stress on site-specific observation. But Williams's local is the result of a pattern of dislocation in modernity, which Williams incorporates in his poems and turns back against the disembodied scientific language of anthropology that cannot record the participant-observer's disruption and desire.