Still Getting the News from Poems: Reflections on William Carlos Williams in the 21st Century

Panel question: WCW’s importance as a modernist poetic innovator has been thoroughly and incontrovertibly documented by scholars over the past fifty years; hence, my question for the panel involves looking to the future. In your estimation, what is Williams’s most important legacy for 21st century readers and writers? Why? What are the sources of his ongoing relevance to our contemporary times? Which particular elements of his work continue to surprise, delight, and inform us?

Introduction

Kerry Driscoll

professor of english, st. joseph college, west hartford, ct, vice-president of the william carlos williams society, and author of william carlos williams and the maternal muse

(1987).

Last January, out of the blue, I received an email from a university student in Dhaka, Bangladesh, who said that he was interested in writing his senior honors thesis on William Carlos Williams. Would I please send him some books?, he asked, explaining that “these materials are almost impossible to find in our country.” He then appended a list of some forty-five titles, ranging from Adam and Eve & The City to Pictures from Brueghel. Though I have no idea how he got my name or contact information, the earnestness and sheer chutzpah of this young man’s request intrigued me. I responded that I would gladly try to assist him, but that it would be helpful to know more about the nature of his interest in Williams and the particular topic about which he had chosen to write. Thus began a remarkable correspondence in which I learned how and why the poet-physician of Rutherford came to exert such a potent hold on the imagination of a Muslim student living in an impoverished, post-colonial third-world nation halfway across the globe. And in the process, I also came to understand the fundamental essence (and importance) of transnationalism—the latest polysyllabic buzzword favored by contemporary literary critics. For in the 21st century, WCW, one of our most quintessentially American writers, has in fact become a transnational figure.

Mashfique Habib’s introduction to Williams had come from his university tutor—the very term a vestige of British colonialism—in a course on Modern Poetry. They read all the usual suspects—Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Auden, and Yeats—but Williams’s work produced the deepest, most enduring impression. Why? The young man offered a variety of answers—the poet’s “robust technique,” his use of “vivid images, [and] simple yet vigorous details.” Williams, Mashfique declared, “has no peer as a total American writer. He seized experience and turned it into poetry hot with the blood of life. His art raised everything it touched—trees and birds, people and dogs, water and fruit, love and flowers—to a level of startled awareness.” Though the flora and fauna of Bangladesh differ radically from those of northern New Jersey, the luminous clarity of Williams’s vision—his democratic way of seeing—resonated deeply with Mashfique’s own experience. He wrote, “Williams confined himself with single strictness to the life before his eyes. In so doing, his localism becomes international and timeless.”

Last month, Mashfique emailed me again, reporting that his thesis had been accepted by the university’s examining committee. He also attached a copy of the document, which I immediately downloaded and read. Interestingly, the only poem quoted in its entirety in his essay is an obscure piece entitled, “Young Woman at a Window,” written in 1934:

She sits with tears on

her cheek her cheek on

her hand the child

in her lap his nose

pressed to the glass

(CP1 373)

Mr. Habib’s choice is telling. The poignance and power of this lyric lie precisely in its indeterminacy—Who is this woman? Why is she weeping? And exactly where is that window by which she sits? The answers to all these questions—as well as many others elicited by the poem—are irrelevant. Williams’s deliberate suppression of any specific—and therefore delimiting...