Which Side Are You On?

Abstract

Recollections of the author’s 1983 speech on Williams at the MLA Annual Convention led to a critique of his formulation of “official verse culture” with special reference to Randall Jarrell. Are there “sides” in modernist and contemporary American poetry? Some poets seem to be embraced by “both sides” (including, but not at all times, Williams), while others, equally significant, are not. Cultural homogeneity, often unconscious, works against aesthetically necessary diversity. In 1983, as well as in this work, the author employed rhetorical strategies for poetic ends, or possibly vice versa. A strong argument is made for Williams not only as a great poet but a supernal—indeed foundational—thinker for modernist and contemporary poetics.