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War and Degradation in Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams
Author(s) -
Rodrıguez Garcıa José Marıa
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1034/j.1600-0730.2003.580201.x
Subject(s) - consecration , politics , hegemony , ideology , bourgeoisie , criticism , literature , modernism (music) , aesthetics , dialectic , liberalism , democracy , cultural hegemony , sociology , history , philosophy , art , law , theology , political science
ELM and WCW are two of the most significant nativist American poets of the early twentieth century. Not only did they adhere to roughly the same ideology of progressive liberalism, laying emphasis on the radical potential inherent in a more democratic cultural politics, but throughout their writing careers they sought, with varying degrees of success, a return to the autochthonous roots of American culture at the expense of the cosmopolitan and Eurocentric faction of modernism that was to become hegemonic in the 1920s, with the consecration of T.S. Eliot as the leading poet and critic of his generation. In this essay I examine some key texts by both ELM and WCW in which the experience of war and the vocabulary of degradation and filth take center stage. This interest in destruction and decay can be connected to important crises in the two authors' personal lives as well as to larger social and political issues. My conclusion will be that of the two poets only WCW succeeds in going beyond the mere criticism of the genteel and bourgeois cultural traditions in place in his time to envision imaginatively the regeneration of America through a dialectics of destruction and creation, death and rebirth.