The Heavywieght Modernist Championship Fight(WCW vs. T.S Eliot)

Dr. Jordan
WCW versus T.S Eliot Round 1


William Carlos Williams also known as WCW, was an American poet whose concept centered on modernism and imagism. He is very much a centrist of post war poetry, heavenly in the United States, and commenced the habit of open and organic form. He was concerned with everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His most anthologized poem is “The Red Wheel Barrow” and published as part of Spring and All, which is regarded as some of his best work. Although, Williams’s diction about poetry agrees with their high modernist principles, he was not hesitant about his disagreements with major writers such as T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound.


In the poem Spring and All, it is clear that spring is an important part of this poem. Eventually it emerges as a main character taking on almost human characteristics, as it changes the world of the poem. In (lines 14-15); our first glimpse of spring is described as being “sluggish and dazed” These words usually apply to humans but are used as personification for an object or idea of spring, paradoxically T.S Eliot uses spring, particularly April as “April is the cruellest, month, breeding”, “Lilacs of the dead land(Lines 1-2)”. Both use imagery particular spring as a metaphor for the sweeping changes over the whole world in the early 20th Century. World War one is over and Carlos promotes the good of people producing new and exciting art and philosophy and new prosperity. Contrastingly T.S Eliot, though its shifts between satire and divination paints a visual of modern day through obscurity as dark, futile, full of uncertainty and despair, while still incorporating or re-working the literary past of the British customs.


It is some of those dictions, and poetic devices why Williams in his 1919 prologue to Kora in Hell, denounced Eliot as well Ezra Pound as “conformists, preoccupied with rehashing the literary glories of the past, (285)”. Carlos argument stems from his notion of speaking in modern-verse, in the language of the United States, with “verse to be alive, infusing into something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, in the nature of an impalpable revolution (284).” Although, Pound asserted agreeably that poetry should make a new, he discouraged Williams with the notion, past and present can make a new, by that meaning, the past is capable of modernization. For a more modern day example, Hip hop artist Kanye West’s song “Gold digger”, uses the cameo from Ray Charles “ I Got A Woman” and incorporates Kanye’s modern day depiction of a gold digging woman. The track mixes the past musical style of rhythm and blues with a present or modern bouncy hip hop beat. Eliot would agree with this example because it puts the “old and the “new” in a paradox, keeping the past unchanged and the present unpretentious, and evolutionary.


To close T.S Eliot , and WCW share high modernist principles in a broader concept such as wearing out of language, cliché and starting a new, and unpretentious art. They only differ in the issue of determining if the past is a necessity when incorporating the new.


Works Cited
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Jahan Ramazani, pp 284-285, 291-292, 474-479
Pound, Eliot, and the Rhetoric of The Waste Land
Author(s): Marshall McLuhan
Source: New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 3, Anniversary Issue: I (Spring, 1979), pp. 557-580
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468929