Littérature Anglaise PDF

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CM Littérature - L3S1

SPRING AND ALL (1923) CONTENTS 1.

“Anti-poetry”: Experimental Rhetoric and the Language of Violence ....................................................................................... 2 Introduction: The Modernist Moment ........................................................................................................................................... 2 Experimental Rhetoric .................................................................................................................................................................... 2 Poetic agôn and war rhetoric ......................................................................................................................................................... 3

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From the Visual Arts to the Visual Text ........................................................................................................................................ 6 Introduction: Poetry v. Painting?.................................................................................................................................................... 6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 9

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“So Much Depends/Upon” Line Break: Metric Figures in Spring and All’s 27 poems ................................................................ 10 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................. 10 “Free” verse? ................................................................................................................................................................................ 10 2. Measuring verse ....................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................................................... 12

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“Make it New” (Ezra Pound) Newness and the Object of Perception........................................................................................ 13 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................. 13

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Williams' American Ethos and the Poetics of Place ................................................................................................................... 18

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“No Ideas But In Things”: Realism and the Realms of the Imagination ........................................................................................ 21

1. “ANTI-POETRY”: EXPERIMENTAL RHETORIC AND THE LANGUAGE OF VIOLENCE Spring and All is a book of experimental writing, not a collection of poems. It is a hybrid, meaning that it is a blend of prose and poetry. There are 27 poems throughout the book in a numbered series. These poems have no titles, only roman numeral s. INTRODUCTION: THE MODERNIST MOMENT In 1905, Williams went to Penn University and met friends that would become future modernists including Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (HD). Penn was a sort of birthplace of American poetic modernism, but generally the modernists were expatriates. For example, in 1909, Pound went to London. In 1910, TS Eliot went to Paris. In 1912, HD went to London. In 1903, Gertrude Stein went to Paris. So, there is this notion of expatriation amongst the modernists, who were seeking avantgarde scenes and creation. Williams did not go to Europe, so he was the embodiment of resistance. His interest was refounding American poetry like Twain or Whitman/ He had spent two years in Europe as a teenager in Paris and Geneva and had already had this contact with cosmopolitanism.

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Williams had an English father and a Puerto Rican mother who was an artist. He therefore lived in a bilingual home in New Jersey, so in his works he has an emphasis on the local, yet still retains a global vision due to multiculturalism. His name captures the multiplicity of identity.

in 1844, to which Whitman answered, as well as Williams

EXPERIMENTAL RHETORIC Violence in Williams’ works is an echo to aesthetic wars of trendy groups. One such group was from the first modernist phase, that of imagism. This was theorized by Ezra Pound in 1912 and 1913. There were three principles of imagism: 1.

Direct treatment of the thing - creating a sense of immediacy

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To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation - verbal economy

3.

Rhythm must be composed in a sequence of musical phrase, not a metronome - idea of free verse

Therefore, there is violence in the strict banning that Pound advocates. This was a reaction to symbolism, a desire for refusal of excess and obscurity. There is a difference between TS Eliot and Williams: Eliot was more bookish and sought sophistication, whereas Williams was more interested in dynamism, technology and energy. The second phase of modernism was vorticism, which was also theorized by Ezra Pound. It defines the image as a vortex “from which, through which and into which ideas are constantly rushing” - there is an idea of movement and energy. Pound also said “The thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radioactivity, a force transfusing, welding and unifying.” Pound also defines the image as something that presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, or a “radiant node or cluster”. An example of Pound’s poetry as linked to vorticism and imagism would be “In a Station of the Metro”, 1913: The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. The poem is minimalist, with an emphasis on the visual - there is a sense of a fashioning of a new poetic object.

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Agôn means struggle or contest. “The artist figure of a farmer - composing - antagonist” - the word antagonist indicates violence. Art is created in violence, to which writing or poetry is a retaliation; it is the undoing or deconstructing of violence, destroying it in attempt to rescue poetry. Therefore, language is a weapon, which is an avantgarde notion. The first few pages of Spring and All is a response to TS Eliot’s Wasteland, 1922. Williams called Wasteland the “greatest catastrophe to our letters (...) which gave the poem back to the academics.” We can see his distaste in SAA with the quote, “I do not like your poems” (pg.2-3) and so forth, which is a violent reaction to Eliot’s poetry. He is the voice of antagonism.

SPRING AND ALL 3

Williams’ prose is a parody of avantgarde rhetoric of violence. It is Dadaist in spirit, with a humorous tone. On page 4, in Chapter 19, Williams writes, “In the imagination we are from henceforth (...) locked in a fraternal embrace (...) we are one (...) and so, together, we shall begin”. This is a parodic rewriting of Baudelaire. Cf. “ce monstre délicat” – the Monster

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The imagination is supreme

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Destruction as a ritual of Genesis

HOW WILLIAMS IS DIFFERENT FROM ELIOT If we look at the poem “By the road to the contagious hospital...”, we see that it is a parody of the beginning of Wasteland, which starts with “April is the cruellest month”. However, the goals are different. For Williams, time is eternal and poetry serves to create a snapshot of the now, whereas Eliot is more linked with mythological thinking as is done in Europe.

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There is a shift wherein rhythm comes to represent life as opposed to traditional rhythmical meter. It is important to not confuse rhythm and meter.

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FROM THE VISUAL ARTS TO THE VISUAL TEXT

INTRODUCTION: POETRY V. PAINTING? There is a dialectic between two medias: poetry and painting. As said Simonides of Ceos (5th century BC): “poetry is a speaking picture, painting is silent poetry.” Therefore, there is a link between image and text - there is plasticity in text. Simonides suggest an intertwining of the two that leads to pictorial questioning. There are poetic qualities within the arts as well, for example painting has a narrative, so there is a concept of narrativity in painting. This overall concept of the link between the two undermines the time v. space binary. Horace (1st century BC), another poet, said: “As is painting so is poetry.” He talks of the art of poetry and that the two resemble each other. The critic Breslin, who analysed works from both Williams and Demuth, talked of a cross-fertilisation in the arts. Demuth helps Williams find inspiration and vice versa. There is thus an intericonicity and intersemiotics. Ekphrasis means “speaking out” and is, according to WJT Mitchell, the “verbal representation of visual representation”. It is a vivid depiction of a visual work of art. This means that the object represented is twice removed from reality instead of just once. Ekphrasis is a rhetorical device, and an ekphrastic poem is a subgenre of poetic writing. OPPOSITION BETWEEN PAINTING AND POETRY However, for G.E. Lessing (Laocoon), this is a flawed comparison. For him, literature is related to time while art is related to space. He says that painting has an immediate visual impact that can’t be recreated with poetry. Williams, however, will test this assessment. TEXTUAL/ POETIC MODERNITY

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This refers to what extent poetry imports visuality. For example, George Herbert wrote “Easter Wings” in 1633, which is a shaped poem, coming from a revised Greek tradition. It is shaped on a mimetic gesture, in the form of angel wings. Another example would be Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dès (…) in 1896, which was more of a hybrid object which was the start of textual modernity – it was interested in the spacial dimension of the page, the page becoming a sort of open space on which events take place. It was a sort of verbal constellation; the poem was over 25 double pages, with words appearing vertically or slanted, serving as a kind of fragmentation of poetry, as a kind of scattered constellation of words. It tackles poetry as a field of action, which is linked to Williams. It bends the relativity of time and space – they interact. Mallarmé’s equivalent in art would be Marcel Duchamp with Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912. In this painting, there is a decomposition of movement and a form of analytical Cubism which serves to add to the fragmentation of the picture. A group of lines forms a figure and there is a notion of descent, which follows the experience of reading. It is similar to the experience of reading a short, intense Williams poem. It almost precludes linearity. Williams discovers this art in 1913 and it is a watershed moment for him. Of the painting, he said, “I laughed out loud when I first saw it, happily, with relief.” WILLIAMS, “THE GREAT FIGURE” (SOUR GRAPES), 1921 For Williams, the figure is very important. His work is not as wild as Mallarmé’s text, it’s neater, with a justified left margin, yet there are splintered sentences which alludes to fragmentation. Critics call Williams’ poems sliced or chopped prose. There is a tension between linearity and the vertical axis, which creates form. This is the axis of syntax. The poem becomes a vertical object, like a shaped poem. In the poem, there is a figure outlined against a dark background, with a notion of moving tense, meaning that there is movement and tension in the text. It is based in a street corner in Manhattan, which Williams wrote while he was on his way to see Demuth. As a result, Demuth painted I saw the Figure 5 in Gold. The shortness of the lines created by the enjambment leads to a rapid eye movement when reading which is called versus, meaning the constant return of the eye to the next line and the back and forth movement it makes. So, there is an emphasis on visuality. TS Eliot said, “Free verse does not exist”, because stress is not removable from the English language. He talks about the “ghost of meter lurking behind the freest verse”. In the poem, there is a shifting in stress patterns from anapest to trochee, then the poem evolves into softer sounds and rhythms. Demuth’s painting is a kind of reverse ekphrasis. It gives a sense of perspective but not a classical one. There is a conflation of abstract notions, with more realistic items. There is also a stylized repetition of text, which gives as a result a conflation of clarity and confusion. There is a use of inscriptions and text in the painting, like “Bill” and “Carlos”, which references Williams, as well as street signs and WCW’s initials. So the painting is intrinsically linked to the city and Williams. There is a link with Cubist Realism in this painting, which is called Precisionism, a uniquely American movement. The subject is the urban landscape, which used to be deemed not “worthy” of art, but this was turned around with artists like Charles Sheeler, for example with his “American landscape” in 1930. THE EKPHRASTIC POEM

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There are two ekphrastic Williams poems we will be studying.

This is a verbal transcription of Demuth’s “Tuberoses”. The painting uses a non-finito technique, meaning that there is a white space that outlines the object, in this case flowers, which is not painted. The white on the darkness is like a negative photograph. Peter Halter, a critic, said:

The text is built on contrast, on the reversal of opposition. Halter says this is a “ antagonistic interaction”. There is a disjointed, unstructured shape, like a typographic strip. The form is almost like leaves of a bush. There are framing devices that almost attempt to give structure to the poem. There is a process of reversal, where it goes down from flowers to the pot, whereas normally we’d start at the pot and work our way up. This alternate trajectory is similar to Williams’ experience as a reader and a writer.

2. “The rose is obsolete”, poem VII This poem is based off of Juan Gris’ “Flowers”, 1914. Note: Williams only saw it and black and white. The painting is a collage and is made up of cut-outs, which emphasises the notion of cutting. The collage brings different styles together.

We are witnessing the death of the rose yet the renewal of it in the poem, becoming its own thing – no longer a symbol, as can be seen with, “the rose carried the weight of love”. In the painting, we have an outline of a rose, so the rose is saved by its edges. The text revolves around edges and lines in the same way. The text raises a question: is this poem Cubist poetry? It introduces the multiplicity of different viewpoints simultaneously. It has a catalogue effect – the list of adjectives show different viewpoints. There is a quick juxtaposition of elements, which is very Cubist by nature. There is a tension between analytical and synthetic phases of Cubism. There is also the notion of the found object or the readymade. Williams has a desire to recreate this, due to the pure physicality of the thing itself. There are references to photography, as well, with the central American figure of the time being Alfred Stieglitz aith his photography movement Photo Secession. This had a major influence on Williams. This is when the subject matter of art shifts definitively from the pastoral to the urban. This will be discussed further in the following parts. OBJECTIVISM

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Williams on objectivism: “the poem being an object (like a symphony or a cubist painting) it must be the purpose of the poet to make of his words a new form: to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This is what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse” (Autobiography 265) It was an attempt to synthesise technological progress through the use of a camera with a lens, with an objective; this resembled a machine as compared to simply painting on canvas. It was the beginning of a new art, that left an enduring imprint on Williams. Louis Zukofsky, the main theorist of objectivism, took this literally - an objective from optics. Williams’ use of the term is less technical and is more linked to the fact that photography is a ground-breaking new form of art, which he desired in poetry as well. EVOLVING PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITS LINK WITH POETRY Alfred Stieglitz, who was a very influential patron of the arts, published the first issue of Camera Work in 1903. Stieglitz was determined to prove that photography was an art like any other, with as much artistic expression. Among his first photographers, he was influenced by painting. The first phase of his photography movement was called Pictorialism, which is interesting for us because photography was borrowing from the painterly medium. The presence of clouds and smoke in “Hand of Man” (1902), gives the picture a painterly atmosphere, which Stieglitz did to prove that photography was artistic and thus a legitimate art form. Here, we are between nature and industrial, and there is a desire to aestheticize the industrial environment, which hadn’t been done before. The title also could reference the Hand of God, so photography is referenced with manual work and advancement of technology. It could also reference the hand of the photographer making the photographic art. Williams was interested in photography as a mechanical process and equated that with his poetry by saying a poem was “a small or large machine made of words.” The watershed photograph by Stieglitz was “The Steerage” (1907). It is considered one of his most important works, and is identified as the first premodernist photograph of his, which led the movement into that direction as he was a central figure of photography. We’re moving away from Pictorialism toward new ground with a depiction of daily life and a picture that is strongly structured around geometrical lines, depths and intersecting planes. This dispersal of form was acknowledged as impressive by Picasso himself. The composition of the photograph was impressive as it was dealing with things and not unnecessary symbolism. Finally, Stieglitz’ portrait of his wife, “Georgia O’Keeffe-Neck” (1921) is interesting as it is a strongly decentralised portrait, which is fragmentary and revolutionary for a photographic portrait. It serves as a deconstruction of the portrait; there is a refusal to capture the subject as a whole, instead zooming in on what the subject is made up of. The photo is as much a expression of its author as a reflection of its subject. “SOMEBODY DIES EVERY FOUR MINUTES”, POEM XXV Bridging the gap between this and Williams’ poetry, we will look at poem XXV. This plays with the display of verbal messages in the urban landscape, in the same kind of landscape Stieglitz showed us. These verbal displays come from an environment filled with signs. There are fragments that could be found in the press or billboards in the public space, especially during commuting, as Williams often did. So, he borrows from advertising and communication and attempts to import the vocabulary of visual ads into the poetic space. He uses words, typography and absence of punctuation as one does in advertising. He creates a parallel between the two, superimposing these images. This emulates the overstimulated urban landscapes filled with neon signs.

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CONCLUSION To conclude, William is against the traditionalists of plagiarism, meaning those who uphold “tradition” (pg. 15), “science”, “philosophy”, “art” (pg. 16). Williams wages war against pure mimesis, copy, stasis and emptiness. In poem V, he captures his motto, “How easy to slip/ into the old mode, how hard to/ cling firmly to the advance -” Williams supports a new axiology (set of valu...