William Carlos Williams and “The Real English Spirit”

Atruism in discussion of William Carlos Williams is that his aggressive call for a nativist literature sets itself against what he saw as the oppressive English tradition. Williams shares this view with many other American modernists, and for that matter with many American writers of earlier generations too. For the modernists this English tradition had been upheld most recently by the genteel writers of New England. As has often been observed, in Williams’s case his alternative looks towards his Spanish roots, and leads to the different treatment in his work of his mother’s Spanish and of his father’s English heritage, as well as to some of the broader gender distinctions in his work. But on occasion Williams wanted to recognize what he saw as the more positive qualities of English culture, and to claim that those qualities, transmitted through particular individuals, could survive the indifference or even hostility of their native land, aided if necessary through exile. The treatment of such figures by English culture, for Williams, mirrored in some ways what he saw as his own treatment, and his own embattled response, within U.S. culture. Not surprisingly Williams co-opts such figures to his own side. Three such allies that Williams brings to his cause are his English grandmother Emily Dickenson Wellcome, D. H. Lawrence, and Ford Madox Ford.

Williams’s most explicit poem on the subject of England appeared in The Partisan Review in late summer 1941, just a few months after the first intensive German bombing of London and other English cities. Somewhat provocatively Williams titled the poem “An Exultation” (“‘to rejoice in triumph,” and “‘to glory, as in victory,” according to Webster’s), and five exclamation points within the poem’s twenty-two lines emphasize the rejoicing. While acknowledging that the Axis nations are “rotten to the core,” the poem sees the recent bombing of England as a “cleansing mystery” that offers the chance for “a purity” to arise from the destruction (CP2 42).

Both in the poem itself and in the long “Footnote” that accompanied the poem in The Partisan Review Williams associates his view of England with the life and death of Emily Dickenson Wellcome. She becomes the authority for the poem’s position on the bombing: “learn through abnegation / as she did, to send up thanks to those who / rain fire upon you.” Despite being “excoriated by devils” she “preserved in the end,” the poem argues, “a purity” that lasts beyond her physical death—“She didn’t die!” The poem is cast in the Spiritualist terms in which Emily Wellcome saw the world extending beyond the death of the body (“sins,” “heaven,”“devils,” “mystery”), and the “exultation” is as much for that “purity” that Williams sees her embodying as for the bombing by “the agents / of destruction.” Both Emily Wellcome, and the action of the “bombs” in destroying the slums and the “most noble and historic edifices,” illustrate, the poem argues, that “purity” which could make England a “regenerator of nations.”

Paul Mariani, discussing this poem in A New World Naked, considers the “Footnote” to be “incoherent” (452). But while the “Footnote” is curiously reasoned—itself a measure of Williams’s ambivalent feelings about England—it does make explicit the attitude behind the poem, and suggests that one of the nations that could be regenerated is the United States. Williams acknowledges that he has “inherited her resentment against England” (she kept her reasons for leaving “a mystery”), but adds “at heart, I am in great part proud of my English blood.” What needs to be destroyed, for Williams, is “that part of the English character” with which T. S. Eliot “and others like him have allied themselves.” That destruction, Williams argues—in language which again evokes Emily Wellcome’s spiritualism—must come from an “economic and therefore spiritual hurricane,” one that will save the qualities of England “which I, in a way very different from theirs, profoundly love” (reprinted in CP2 452–53).

The Emily Wellcome figure, as the “Great Queen,” regenerates Williams’s poetry in “The Wanderer,” helping him to become “a mirror to this...