The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

This book is a reassessment of the poetic achievement of William Carlos Williams in the light of the influence of such visual arts movements as Cubism, Dada, Futurism and Precisionism. The author argues that Williams essentially developed his concept of the modern poem by adopting the revolutionary ideas propagated by painters and theoreticians in the wake of Cézanne and the Post-Impressionists. A series of detailed interpretations of Williams’ poems, embedded in the context of modern art in general, provides us with insight into the work of one of the most important American poets of this century.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments; List of abbreviations; Introduction; Prelude: getting in touch; 1. ‘A poem can be made of anything’; 2. Vortex; or, a thing is what it does; 3. The poem as a field of action; 4. Soothing the savage beast: Cubist realism and the urban landscape; 5. The virgin and the dynamo; 6. The search for a synthetic form; 7. The poem on the page; Conclusion; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.