American Modernist Poetry

Résumé du document

Commentaire de texte sur "Spring and All" de William Carlos Williams.

Extraits

[...] Williams' aesthetic is one of locality and immediacy, concerned only with “the direct treatment of the thing”. Where Eliot deals in metaphors, Williams deals in metonymy; words and images are no pretexts for free association, and language is material. This essay will attempt to account for Williams' approach to poetics by considering the particularity and contiguity omnipresent in the poem, then by tracing how its intellectual movement is inscribed in – and brought about by – form. The second stanza encapsulates the general method of the whole poem: like the “patches of standing water”, it reflects a particular landscape in fragments. [...]

[...] The paradox denies the usual poetic/metaphorical connotations of spring, the clichés associated with it. In a movement characteristic of Williams's poetry, it eschews past literature and pre-existing layers of language to build something original from observation and through material rendering of the thing. It makes sense, given the general movement of the poem, that this fourth stanza should contain such a pivotal articulation, for it marks a transition between two parts of the poem: the first is a description of desolation that moves towards a general quickening in the second. [...]

[...] In the second part, rising inversions support the fragmentary expression of the epiphany: “(en)ter the new world” (line 16) and “the profound change” (line 25). It is fully expressed in the next to last stanza, which the whole poem hinges upon: x x x x One by one the objects are defined – x x x [ x It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf This first line has a perfect alternation of beats and offbeats, which stands out in a poem that does not follow any meter to the letter. This communicates the newly gained limpidity, the sudden legibility of the landscape. [...]

[...] He immediately and radically chooses to avoid aphorism, generalities, and rather to anchor his work in a localized reality. In a similar gesture, on line he suppresses the copula from the sentence, replacing it with a dash: x ] “northeast – a cold wind” But the rhythm does not even allow the reader to pause and acknowledge the absence of the verb, for it is caught between the two offbeats in a rising inversion: the pace quickens and the copula/its absence is subsumed in it. [...]

[...] Similarly, “leaf” appears at the end of two lines (21 and 23) and is also part of the same rhythmical movement in the two instances: x x “the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf” x x “it quickens: clarity, outline of leaf” The “cold wind” makes two apparitions (line 3 and and is thus “familiar” the second time around. The “reddish ( ) stuff of bushes” is (absence of verb once again) “all along the road”, so because they are in contact, they are brought together through alliteration: “road”, “reddish” (line 9). Similarly, “leafless” and “lifeless” are joined by sound and position in the line (line 13 and forming something akin to anaphora. This is especially interesting because it is a materialization of what could have become a metaphor in the hands of many other poets. [...]