In Search of the Low-Down Americano: H. H. Lewis, William Carlos Williams, and the Politics of Literary Reception, 1930–1950

IN his quest to define America through poetry, to unearth the roots that give meaning to the land and its people, in a language “modified by our environment; the American environment” (Int 59). William Carlos Williams found an obscure and oddly gifted companion, whose quest intersected with his own at critical crossings in both poets’ lives. An inquiry into these crossings helps illuminate the climate of literary reception and the conditions of literary production that affected the recognition of both. “Of all the American modernists,” Charles Tomlinson writes, “Williams was the most tardy in receiving recognition. His writing lifetime was dominated by the literary criteria of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, in neither of whose terminology was there a place for the kind of thing Williams was concerned with doing” (Williams, Selected Poems xvi). On a lower register, and for reasons that had as much to do with Lewis’s erratic temperament as the politics of literary reception, the same might be said of H. H. Lewis. The studies of Paul L. Mariani, in his seminal biography of Williams, Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery, and Jack Salzman, in Years of Protest, citing the friendship and contested interventions between Williams and Lewis, began the essential spadework, but a more thorough investigation of the particularities and consequences of the WilliamsLewis connection is needed. In the following study, drawing from correspondence, contemporary