“This is all beyond you”: Transgression and Creative Force in the Early Love Poems of William Carlos Williams

| This article demonstrates how transgression was both a conceptual and material principle for William Carlos Williams. With close attention to two tonally ambiguous love poems, “The Young Housewife” and the “The Ogre,” it tracks how Williams deployed the poetic line to contend with the possibilities and perils of transgression. The conscientious recasting of tradition in both poems prepares the way for Williams’s interest in the problems of love poetry throughout his career and how his use of poetic transgression, not always violent, often yields a particularly modern ambiguity in forcing the mind of the reader to hold multiple ostensibly contradictory images at once. By utilizing transgressive content and then pushing on the boundaries that constitute something as transgressive, “The Young Housewife” and “The Ogre” question the tenability of societal structures that force unilateral judgments. Williams recognizes the limitations of language as they exist for modernist poets, but sees the valuable possibilities in transgressing artistic and social boundaries to prove to others that those boundaries are self-imposed.