William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of CultureBremen's study examines the development of William Carlos Williams's poetics, focusing in particular on Williams's ongoing fascination with the effects of poetry and prose, and his life-long friendship with Kenneth Burke. Using a framework based on Burke's and Williams's theoretical writings and correspondence, as well as on the work of contemporary cultural critics, Bremen looks closely at how Williams's poetic strategies are intimately tied to his medical practice, incorporating a form of methodological empiricism that extends his diagnoses beyond the individual to include both language and community. The book develops a series of rhetorical, cognitive, medical, and political analogues that clarify the poetic and cultural achievements Williams hoped to realize in his writing. |
Contents
| 3 | |
| 9 | |
2 The Language of Flowers | 44 |
3 Modern Medicine | 84 |
4 Attitudes Toward History | 121 |
5 The Radiant Gist | 160 |
Notes | 201 |
Bibliography | 219 |
Index | 229 |
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Common terms and phrases
American Grain analogous Attitudes Toward History become Benjamin Book Burke's calls Chapter Cress criticism culture cure diagnosis dialectic difference discovery disease doctor domination Eliot embodies empathic identification Essays Ezra Pound fact feminine figure forces Fredric Jameson gender grammar of signs grammar of transference grammar of translation Gurlie Heinz Kohut ideal ideas imagination individual Jameson Jessica Benjamin Kenneth Burke kind language of flowers letter liams's literary literature Louis Zukofsky male Marsden's means medicine Mike Weaver Mitchell's modern narcissistic nomothetic object past Paterson Paul Mariani Philodemus philosophy poem poet poetry political Pound prose psychology radiant gist recognition relationship relies rhetorical Rome sense social Social Credit Spring structures symbolic action T. S. Eliot tension textual Theory things tradition Trans University Press verse voice Whitman William Carlos Williams Williams explains Williams says Williams's Williams's poetics Williams's writing words York
Popular passages
Page 130 - ... a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a sumultaneous order.
Page 182 - Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
Page 23 - A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. — Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in 'seeing connexions'.
Page 18 - Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf One by one objects are defined— It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf...
Page 109 - ... a sort of creative power of its own ; either in representing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in which they were received by the senses, or in combining those images in a new manner, and according to a different order.
Page 26 - Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods...
Page 13 - When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.
Page 49 - Pink confused with white flowers and flowers reversed take and spill the shaded flame darting it back into the lamp's horn petals aslant darkened with mauve red where in whorls petal lays its glow upon petal round flamegreen throats petals radiant with transpiercing light...
Page 107 - Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth — nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness.