American Modernism and the Poetics of Identity

I “My country, right or wrong”

What William Carlos Williams was prepared in 1929 to call “modernism” had at its “base,” he claimed, a commitment to “the reality of the word.” ¹ His point in calling attention to this reality was above all to insist on the primacy of “language” over “ideas” and so The Embodi-ment of Knowledge urges, for example, that to make ourselves “modern” we take Shakespeare seriously as a writer and “reject” him “as a thinker” (EK, 13). But this preference for language over ideas involved more than a preference for poetry over philosophy; it involved a commitment to what Williams calls “the materials of letters,” which are “real” and which “supersede in themselves all ideas, facts, movements which they may under other circumstances be asked to signify” (EK, 17). Even “the spaces between the words” count as an element of language, not because they signify something (since signification is what is being superseded) or even because they have a diacritical function—you might count the spaces “for measurement’s sake,” Williams says, but you don’t need to since they should “properly” “be considered themselves words—of a sort” (EK, 141). The point here is that when signification is eliminated as the criterion of the linguistic, the spaces between words can be seen to be as much a part of the poem as the words are; if what it means to be part of “language” is to be part of the “materials” of the poem, then the white spaces on the page are essentially part of those materials. Hence Williams’s famous attention to where those white spaces should be put and to how much of them there should be; in what may constitute the ne plus ultra of the materialist aesthetic in poetry, he is even reported to have weighed his poems, as if once one recognized that the modernity of the modern poem consisted in its claim to be “itself” rather than to mean something else, all the physical features of the poem (what it looked like, what it sounded like, how heavy it was) became its defining characteristics.

The manuscript he put together in 1928 and 1929 under the title The Embodiment of Knowledge testifies in prose to the intensity of his desire to make poems that would in fact count as objects rather than signs—“words,” “not symbols” (EK, 18). But the ambition to make such poems is already visible in Spring and All (1923), and especially in that collection’s first poem, which is also its most explicit response to the publication the year before of what Williams would call in his Autobiography “the great catastrophe to our letters,” Eliot’s The Waste Land. ² Williams identified what he regarded as the failure of The Waste Land with what he called “plagiarism,” by which he meant not the copying of other poems but the copying of “reality.” Spring and All attacks the “traditionalists of plagiarism” by replacing the copy of reality with “reality itself,” by making “the writing have reality.” ³ It is significant, for example, that versions of the words “spring,” “and,” and “all” are distributed through the opening description of “the waste,” “brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen / patches of standing water / the scattering of tall trees / All along the road” (SA, 183). “Fallen,” “tall,” “all” and, elsewhere, “small” and even “hospital” repeat the “reality” of “all,” an effect that is even more striking with the repetition of “standing” (which produces both “and” and a version of “spring”), then “scattering,” and later “upstanding” and “spring” itself. This deployment of “-ing” takes up quite literally the distinctive participles of The Waste Land’s opening lines (“breeding,” “mixing,” “stirring”) in an effort not only to free the words of what Williams contemptuously called “the pleasing wraiths of former masteries” ⁴ but also to assert the primacy of the “materials” demanded by “modernism.” Although “By the road to the contagious hospital” is invariably praised for its precise description of the landscape, there is an important sense in which what these lines do above all is produce...