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SIX 3 Pastoral Mode william carlos williams and nativist portraiture In 1914, william carlos williams sent a sequence of “Pastorals and Self-Portraits” to his friend Viola Baxter. Like Eliot’s “On a Portrait” and Pound’s “La Donzella Beata” and “Portrait: from ‘La Mère Inconnue,’” these poems were the first in a series of portraits that Williams would write in the nineteen-teens, before moving on to more expansive forms in the 1920s. The group of eight poems included two “Self-Portraits,” two “Pastorals,” and two “Idyls.” As these titles suggest, Williams saw an affinity between pastoral and portraiture in the sense that the natural world, specifically landscape, was his subject in both genres. Many of Williams ’s subsequent portraits focus on the body of the subject and liken it to soil, trees, flowers, and even clouds and weather. At this time Williams felt “very much attracted by the pastoral mode,” as he commented later.1 Williams used pastoral to shape his portraiture and distinguish it from the nineteenth-century tradition as well as from Eliot’s and Pound’s work in the same genre. This chapter looks at three stages of Williams’s portraits : the 1914 “Pastorals and Self-Portraits” sequence, the portraits of Al Que Quiere! (1917), and his “Portrait of a Lady” as it was published in a sequence of landscape poems in The Dial in 1920. Each employs pastoral in a different way. Although his use of the pastoral mode began as a way of connecting to an ancient literary tradition, Williams gradually turned the pastoral portrait into a vessel for his Nativist politics, seeking a form of poetry that was independent from European culture. In modulation, a work of one genre adopts an incomplete set of traits from another genre (a “mode”) without changing its basic form and identity . One of the most common modes is the pastoral, which appears almost always in its adjectival form conferring its attributes on another 184 Modulations 1912 to 1922 genre (pastoral elegy, eclogue, play, etc.). The pastoral mode can take many different forms, including representing nature, contrasting rural and urban life, and treating the subjects of work and working-class lives.2 As more than one critic has noted, Williams used pastoral traits for social and political critique. Focusing primarily on Al Que Quiere!, John Marsh argues that Williams invented a modern counter-pastoral by “cast[ing] a spotlight on the rural poor and working class . . . to intervene in his hometown (Rutherford, New Jersey) and its politics, which suffered from their own ‘unreal, prettified, [and] remote’ tendencies.”3 For Marsh, Williams ’s move to pastoral was motivated both by the desire to distinguish himself as a poet and by sympathy for the working poor. In contrast, Maria Farland claims that Williams’s pastoral in Spring and All of 1923 engages with a “newly anti-rural strain in early twentieth-century American thought,” a discourse that treated rural and agrarian America as degenerate and in need of scientific expertise.4 The divergence between these two interpretations has something to do with the difference in Williams’s own beliefs between 1916, when many of the poems of Al Que Quiere! were written, and 1923. Williams was swept up in the Nativist movement that exploded in both art and politics at the end of World War I.5 The focus of Progressive politics shifted around 1920 from aiding and improving the underprivileged to promoting Americanness and purifying American “stock,” both racially and culturally. As Walter Michaels has argued, Williams’s emphasis on the “American thing”—as in his famous slogan, “No ideas except in things”—participates in a larger Nativist discourse of racial purity and anti-immigration politics, which fully emerged in the 1920s.6 As Williams became involved in this movement, switching his allegiance from a transatlantic literary tradition to a nationalist loyalty, he readjusted the meaning of pastoral from an ancient poetic mode to an affirmation of the physical body. Williams’s connection to the Nativist movement in the visual arts is well known. In the first study of Williams’s ties to the contemporary art scene, Bram Dijkstra emphasized Williams’s involvement in Alfred Stieglitz’s program for the renewal of American arts.7 Following Dijkstra, Schmidt observed that Williams’s poetry shares many elements of Precisionist painting and photography, especially as seen in the works of Stieglitz , Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, and Charles Sheeler. A loosely organized movement under Stieglitz’s mentorship that emerged after...

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