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

This book is a major step toward a fuller exploration of the connection between the visual arts and Williams's concept of the Modernist poem.

Peter Halter (Author)

9780521431309, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 July 1994

288 pages, 21 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.53 kg

The formation of Modernist literature took place in a cultural climate characterised by an unprecedented collaboration between painters, sculptors, writers, musicians and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Within this multifaceted movement, William Carlos Williams is a paradigmatic case of a writer whose work was the result of a successful attempt at integrating ideas and concepts from the revolutionary visual arts. This book is a major step toward a fuller exploration of the connection between the visual arts and Williams' concept of the Modernist poem and of his achievement in transcending an art-for-art's-sake formalism to create poems which both reflect their own nature as a work of art and vividly evoke the world of that they are a part. As Williams' repeatedly stressed, 'It must not be forgot that we smell, hear and see with words and words alone and that with a new language we smell, hear and see afresh…'

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]