An American mythology: William Carlos Williams and the poetics of modernism

The modernist period (1920 to 1960) in America was a time of diverse and complex cultural upheaval. Modern poets both at home and abroad attempted to track and record the events of the time, but the modernist approach to both history and poetics was different in America than in England and Europe. William Carlos Williams, and, to some extent, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, defined what was “American” in their verse. To do so, a distancing from traditional notions of history, literature and other disciplines became one of the central themes of their work.

This dissertation is a study of the American modernists and their approach to a new system of national letters. For this work’s purpose, “myth” is defined as the practices, beliefs, customs, philosophy and ideology of American culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using the approach of the poet as the “writer of culture,” I examine how Williams and the other modernist poets redefined American culture through the reification of values, ideals and social practices. While I take the position that culture is responsible for the “break” from European tradition, I argue that the poet is responsible for mapping, defining and cataloguing the development and evolution of this break. The “myth” of America is thus separate from its constructed history; it is a more authentic portrait of American culture.