The Poet as a Man of Action: Emersonian Reflections on Williams’s The Wedge

This essay argues for the usefulness of Richard Poirier’s work on the significance of Emerson and William James for understanding William Carlos Williams.¹ Though his intellectual links to the pragmatist John Dewey are well known, few have pursued the Emersonian attitude in Williams, which can be traced back through Ernest Fenollosa’s galvanizing essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, first edited and published by Ezra Pound in 1918. The essay reveals Fenollosa’s heavy debt to William James and so in turn shows James’s reliance on the work of his god-father, Emerson. This Emersonian tradition has been articulated most fully by Poirier and his students, but this tradition is really better termed an active, attentive attitude towards experience. Pragmatism comes from the Greek word for action, π????? (pragma), its primary characteristic being an active skepticism about philosophical skepticism concerning “practical consequences.” Pragmatism is, James reminds us, “a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise would be interminable” (James 377). However, it is more than a way of cutting metaphysical Gordian knots. Pragmatism is a process of truth-making: truths are made not found; truth is not a “stagnant property” inherent in an idea, but an activity, a “process of valid-ation,” James stresses. For Williams, as for other poets in the Emersonian line like Wallace Stevens, truth “must change” (SE 208).

Specifically, I want to make the case for the efficacy of Poirier’s approach to Williams’s war book, The Wedge, and I will claim that Williams got much of his James indirectly though Fenollosa. Finally, I will propose that we read The Wedge along with its famous introduction as an expression of the Jamesian branch of Emersonian pragmatism. If we do so, we grasp better Williams’s creative violence and his quarrel with petrified public power.

Despite his wish in the “Author’s Introduction” to The Wedge that “the metaphysical” should “take care of itself, the arts have nothing to do with it” (CP2 54), Williams’s relationship to philosophy and to the act of thinking demands clarification. Throughout the 1980s and 90s critics struggled to make sense of Williams’s attempt to overcome “metaphysics”—specifically the subject/object binary that had underwritten western philosophy since Descartes—and even to over-ride the poetic implications of modern philosophy altogether; that is, all the problems of philosophical dualism: subject vs. object, the mind vs. the embodied world, words vs. things—in short, “the language problem” that has vexed 20th century philosophy. One almost wants to call Williams’s life project “a reply to Descartes with the bare hands!” In recent decades critics have quarreled over whether Williams was an idealist in the Romantic and transcendental tradition or whether he was materialist, as “no ideas but in things” seems, at first, to imply: the objectivist Williams. Some critics, Carl Rapp and Donald Markos, for example, find a transcendental strain of Romantic idealism in Williams; others, like J. Hillis Miller and Joseph Riddel, a nascent “post-modernism.” Stanley Koehler and Zhaoming Qian have even argued that Williams’s way out of the metaphysical dilemma was in effect Taoist. Both of these latter moves are attempts either to deconstruct or evade philosophical dualism. Even if we agree with Henry Sayre’s view in The Visual Text of Williams Carlos Williams that “rather than giving up the dualism of subject and object which is so central to western thought, Williams embraced it” (5), Williams’s philosophical struggle seems the place where all Williams criticism starts and usually ends.

Any way critics look at it, metaphysics does have something to do with it. Some philosophy is necessary because Williams was engaged in a classic struggle to know reality through representation in language and, therefore, through a poetics oppressed by the problems of what is really real, and what is translatable into language. For the poet that means “the virtual impossibility of lifting [via writing] to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses” (SE 11). Here, Williams admits a kind of literary...