Compelling Objects: Form and Emotion in Williams’s Lyric Poetry

WILLIAM Carlos Williams’s canonical status represents a convergence of the rise to dominance of “theory” in literary criticism and Williams’s own deep desire for cultural authority through his writing. Though many have viewed Williams as an energetic (proto) postmodern rebel against traditional poetic values, much of Williams’s energy in his lyric poetry comes from his attempts to harness what he viewed in rather traditional terms as the feminine power of the body. Noteworthy in Williams’s oeuvre are the many objects—material and human—that hold an almost iconic status. As he said, famously: “No ideas but in things.” But Williams’s objects are internal as well. Because form is the generative shaping activity between self and other, involving the abstract creation of simulacra of experience, form is intimately connected to the emotional power of objects. There is growing scholarly interest in how poetry can provide a “sensuous knowledge.” Attention to Williams’s poetic objects reveals the strategies whereby he attempted to capture the erotic power of the body. While many of his early poems achieved a taut emotional clarity through the tension between form and imagistic content, many of his later lyric poems relaxed and lost much of the tension that allowed “significant form” to develop in the space between text and reader. Objects in Williams’s poems, far from being “innocent” artifacts in the world, demonstrate the quality of Williams’s relations with himself and his others.