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)

9780521102667, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 March 2009

288 pages, 21 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.43 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]