Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.
Modern American Poetry, 1899-1950 (Part 3)
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modern American Poetry
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From the lesson
Module 1
Reassessing Modernism's Origins
Meet the Instructors
Cary NelsonJubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
[MUSIC]
Unlike Mary Ann Moore, William Carlos Williams's
incorporation of popular references was not primarily textual.
Moore's working with documents.
Williams' incorporation was experiential.
He was born near Patterson, New Jersey, established a medical practice there
that he actually maintained throughout much of his adult life.
But his literary life was centered in New York City.
From 1916 to 1923, he successfully established a kind
of new poetics that was grounded in colloquial American speech.
That was his innovation, or part of it.
The difference that he made in modern American poetry was helping to bring
ordinary American speech into the language of poems.
His medical practice actually helped.
It kept him grounded in ordinary daily life by
keeping him in touch with, often lower and
middle class families, the lives that they live, the language that they used.
His lyrics including the famous, The Red Wheelbarrow and
others, often separated from Spring and All, his 1923 book,
as a result seem unusually transparent and accessible.
Yet, they are actually both unstable and infinitely interpretable.
Nearly 100 years later, critics still cannot decide
where Williams' investments lie in the young housewife.
Let me read it.
At 10 AM, the young housewife moves about in negligee
behind the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the curb to call the ice-man, fish-man, and
stands shy, uncorseted, tucking in stray ends of
hair, and I compare her to a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car, rush with a crackling sound
over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
Along with Langston Hughes and Robert Frost,
Williams is one of three better known modern American male poets
whose work includes a wide range of portraits of individual women.
The difference, however,
is that Williams' interest is consistently both social and erotic.
Like John Crowe Ransom, women are indispensable to Williams' work.
Without their presence in his poetry, his poems would be substantially impoverished.
Unlike Ransom however, Williams' perspective on women is rich and
varied, and generally affirmative.
Moreover, Williams treats men and
women the same way, something Ransom was disinclined to do.
That doesn't exempt Williams from charges of sexism, it certainly hasn't.
No doubt many contemporary readers would be troubled
by the characterization of women at various points in his work, and
find many of his affirmations reifying or objectifying.
Indeed, no one who's grownup in a sexist culture will be entirely free of sexism.
But Williams' work often partly triumphs over these limitations, and
it is, if anything, strengthened by comparison with other men and
women writing at the same time.
Williams regularly wrote poems about mens and womens interactions.
He wrote love poems to women through his long career.
And their approach can be sacrilizing,
irreverent, erotic, mythologizing or realistic.
His brief portraits of individual women remain among the best poems he wrote.
These portraits are often sexually charged but
then almost everything Williams describe is.
Like Amy Lowell's flower imagery for example, or Georgia O'Keeffe's
flower paintings, Williams' flowers are charge with sexuality.
Indeed even his most spare descriptions of nature,
as in the 1927 poem Young Sycamore, are highly sensual.
It's possible that the human body, and more specifically a woman's body,
is the implicit object underlying many of the individual things he celebrates.
Notably, however, his physical descriptions of men,
as in the 1919 poem, The Young Laundryman, are also quite sensual and
equally focused on telling details, such as this passage.
His muscles ripple under the thin blue shirt; and his naked feet,
in their straw sandals, lift at the heels, shift and find new postures continually.
William certainly fragments men's and women's bodies to describe them.
But he most often does so
in order assemble either telling portraits of whole persons, or
representative characterizations of people's social positioning.
If there's a hint of objectification in this process of representation,
it seems relatively harmless.
That's a cultural and political judgement on my part, but i'm willing to make it.
Representation wholly without justification may in fact be impossible.
When it predominates and there's nothing else, that's another matter.
But treating any trace of it in earlier periods as a fatal heresy,
I think, is irrational.
Recent fervor about objectification may be a contemporary neurosis
we'd be better off not imposing on our predecessors.
At the very least,
there is a chance that these charges are hopelessly anachronistic.
On the other hand, the arguments disseminated simultaneously with modernism
by the first wave of modern feminism give more than sufficient warrant to
read Ezra Pound's and John Crowe Ransom's sexism rather more severely.
And consider it misogynist even within it's historical context.
I think Williams is more complex and nuanced.
Part of what sustains poems,
like the Young Housewife, in which the woman observed, quote,
moves about in negligee behind the wooden walls of her husband's house.
Beyond it's spare precise description, is Williams' willingness
to acknowledge and even mock his presence as an observer.
You're aware that he's in the poem watching, and
he, in some ways, critiques that vantage point.
As with Woman Walking, another poem, the poet is never simply
an invisible figure who wields the power to name and describe, but
rather a speaker whose voice affects a relationship in verse.
And that relationship typically includes a genuine,
if sometimes whimsical reflection, of the issues at stake in the poet's role.
So the poem masquerades at once as a piece of literal reporting and
a fantasy surveillance.
It's a kind of celebration and critique of voyeurism at the same time.
We can credit the speaker with some sensitivity to women's social status,
when the house is described as the husband's property.
But we may also wonder, as one of my students suggested,
if we can here negligent and negligible judgementally echoing within the negligee
she wears as a garment as well that suggest more corporeal property rights.
Whether the speaker would protect her, take advantage of her, or
merely observe her in her shy vulnerability, we really cannot say.
We cannot even be certain whose innocence wains
most notably in the poems or autumnal seasons.
The speakers, the young housewives, or even the readers, for
we too are implicated in the poem's final recognition.
Is it guilty self recognition, mutual recognition,
an exchange of glances, shame, regret or delight,
in transience that sounds in the crackling leaves of the poem's last stanza.
One critic suggests that the young housewife is metaphorically crushed in
the last stanza, since in the previous stanza Shakespearean conclusion,
she is herself compared to a fallen leaf.
But it's as easily the moment and
the fantasy relationship that give way as the speaker's car passes.
Moreover, the only real pressure exerted
is the poem's descriptive act of possession.
No fixed reading of Williams' short poems will survive sustained reflection.
Despite what seems their straightforward narrative, they remain so ambiguous and
unresolved that one interpretation continually displaces or reverses another.
Thus a particular poem made from one moment to the next seem distinctly sexist,
and generally understanding.
As many of his critics have noted, there's also a strong methologizing element
in the image of women in his longer poems, from The Wanderer to Patterson.
The woman who is his guide in the poem, The Wanderer, is both young and old,
virgin and whore, the latter identity meanwhile is partly celebratory.
She's quote, a reveller in all ages.
Knower of all fires out of the bodies of all men.
For Williams, women appear sometimes to have stronger links to
the transformative natural processes that all of us must undergo if
we're to rise above the pettiness and violence of much of human history.
Of course though they're closer to nature,
in Williams they're not unconscious figures.
Rather they have special knowledge men must seek to share and
that Williams would bring into his poetry.
Williams is also aware that not every mythic vision of women is beneficial.
And in the American grain, in a journey that Ezra Pound,
sort of completed in the opposite direction.
Walter Raleigh fantasizes himself on a voyage on the body of his queen,
when he plunges, quote, his lust into the body of a new world.
Of course, Raleigh's fantasy ends in disaster.
What Williams in the end shows us, is one route to a substantially affirmative and
generous heterosexuality in poetry.
He clearly believed that heterosexuality, sexual relations in general,
could reorient people toward restorative natural processes and
away from the destructive tendencies in modern culture.
This differentiates very much from TS Eliot, for example, for
whom failed sexual relations in The Waste Land and
other poems explicitly exemplified the modern condition.
Indeed, for Eliot, nature itself no longer offers any hope.
In a culture whose inherited and active linguisticality is permeated
with gendered binarisms, Williams sorts out these meanings and
reconfigures them and changes their meaning.
There were certain binary metaphors of gender he found productive and
life-enhancing, others he considered destructive.
That all these gendered binarisms were phantasmic,
artifices of cultural processes with no necessary grounding in the fact of nature.
Williams himself may never have realized, but if we wish to judge him,
we had best realize that all of us live partly by way of myth and ideology.
What one does not find in Williams, however,
is a thoroughgoing critic of patriarchal culture and
all the gender binarisms by which it sustains and reproduces itself.
Williams never got that far.
[MUSIC]
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