The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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…'