The Influence of Chinese Boudoir Poem on American Modernist Poet Williams’The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

Chinese poetry has exerted a great influence on American modernist poets,especially on William Carlos Williams(1883-1963).William Carlos Williams’The Widow’s Lament in Springtime shares some connections with Chinese Boudoir poems in theme,image,and technique.This paper tends to discuss the influence of Chinese Boudoir poems on William Carlos Williams based on his creating of The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,which provides a new perspective for studying the communication of Chinese and American poetry.

“Seek it in Poetry”:John Dewey,William Carlos Williams,and Avant-Gardist Educational Reform

This essay looks at the unlikely conjunction of avant-garde poetics, educational reform, and the ideas of John Dewey in the work of William Carlos Williams, a conjunction unaddressed in the major critical treatment of Williams and Dewey, John Beck’s Writing the Radical Center. I focus mainly on Williams’s work of the 1920s, when he was reading Dewey’s essays in The Dial and thinking through some of his most central poetic and philosophic principles in relation to Dewey. This decade culminates in the Dewey-influenced The Embodiment of Knowledge . Williams’s hopes in Embodiment that poetry might somehow contribute to reshaping the bases of the educational system had already appeared a few years earlier in one of the touchstones of avant-garde poetics, the 1923 Spring and All , where a number of the later work’s central concepts arise. With Spring and All seized by customs officials and Embodiment unpublished until 1974, this crucial aspect of Williams’s poetics went almost completely overlooked at the time. However, the notes that make up Embodiment extend Spring and All not just thematically but in their disjunctive, paratactic, and tonally confrontational method as Williams works out through the 1920s his avant-garde poetics of educational reform.

Shakespeare and Experimental American Poetry

Why the particular emphasis proposed in my title on Shakespeare’s importance for experimental or avant-garde American poetry?We can take Shakespeare’s significance for American poetry generally,as for most writers in the English language,as a given.One can certainly trace Shakespeare’s presence in a wide range of more mainstream twentieth-century poetry,from John Berryman to Anthony Hecht to Sylvia Plath,and anthologies of poetic responses to Shakespeare abound.But the use of the ultimate canonical Anglophone writer by experimental poets dedicated to changing the context of writing and reception in their own time raises some interesting questions not just about Shakespeare’s universal accessibility,availability,and usefulness but about later experimental poets’senses of rupture and continuity.I’m interested in Shakespeare less as a site of continuity and tradition and more one of productive conflict and difference,in what Shakespeare has meant for experimental American poets not just as writer but as symbolic figure,as one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s“representative men.”My goal,then,is not merely to point to the multiple American poetic uses of Shakespeare,but more specifically to suggest how some American poets(from Emerson and Williams to such contemporaries as Susan Howe,Harryette Mullen,Jen Bervin,and K.Silem Mohammad)have used or identified with Shakespeare to buttress what is often a particularly American version of avant-garde poetics.