Les États-Unis n’ont eu de cesse d’attendre depuis Emerson le grand chef d’œuvre national qui célèbrerait le destin d’exception de la jeune démocratie et affranchirait la littérature et la langue américaines de la tutelle du vieux continent. Cette tâche ne pouvait incomber à l’épopée dont on a pu juger qu’elle était inapte à décrire le monde contemporain et qu’elle contredisait une modernité poétique de l’intensité lyrique. La renaissance spectaculaire du « long poème » américain au cours des XIXe et XXe siècle ne peut donc s’inscrire dans la filiation de « formes » jugées obsolètes. Elle paraît d’ailleurs d’autant plus problématique qu’après avoir été rapportée au lyrisme démocratique de Walt Whitman, le « long poème » fut approprié par T.S. Eliot et Ezra Pound et assimilée aux excès d’un « high modernism » autoritaire, élitiste et systématique. C’est ainsi que la critique n’est parvenue à rendre compte paradoxalement de cette « forme » qu’en la niant, confirmant ainsi son illisibilité : le long poème ne pouvait être qu’un recueil de poèmes courts, un chef d’œuvre ruiné ou une parodie de la pensée systématique et de l’exceptionnalisme américain. En étudiant « A » de Louis Zukofsky, Paterson de William Carlos William et les Maximus Poems de Charles Olson, je vise à démontrer qu’il est au contraire possible de lire cette forme en tant que telle sans avoir recours à des typologies génériques ou à la dichotomie modernisme/postmodernisme. Je tenterai aussi de suggérer que, dans ces trois œuvres, la poésie se conçoit comme une activité en devenir qui tente modestement d’articuler le poème au monde, au temps et à la lecture. / Ever since Emerson the United-States have been expecting the great national masterpiece that would not only celebrate the unique destiny of this young democracy but would also free American language and literature from the European model. However, it did not seem that it was for the epic poem to accomplish this task given that it appeared not only ill-suited to describe the modern world but also incompatible with the demands of a poetic modernity predicated on lyrical intensity. Hence, the planned obsolescence of this “form” has made it all the more difficult to explain the spectacular rebirth of the “American long poem” in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has appeared all the more problematic since, after having been associated to Walt Whitman’s democratic lyricism, the “long poem” was appropriated by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound making it the symbol of the authoritarian, elitist and systematic tendencies of “high modernism”. It will thus come as no surprise that the critical community has tended to view the “long poem” negatively confirming in a way its illegibility: the “long poem” could only be viewed as a short lyric sequence, an impossible masterpiece or a parody of systematic thought and American exceptionalism. In undertaking this study of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, William Carlos William’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems I wish to demonstrate that it is possible to read the “long poem” as such without having to resort to generic categories and to the modern/postmodern dichotomy. I also hope to show that, in these three works, poetry is understood as a kind of ongoing activity which modestly attempts to articulate the poem to the world, time and reading.

[pt] Esta dissertação apresenta traduções comentadas de poemas de William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), um autor de destaque no cenário literário norte-americano, mas cuja obra ainda tem pouca circulação no Brasil. Levando em conta o interesse do poeta por artes visuais, optou-se por traduzir os poemas que Williams escreveu a partir de pinturas do mestre flamengo Pieter Brueghel (c. 1525-1569). O percurso proposto começa com um esboço da biografia de Williams, situando-o em relação a alguns de seus contemporâneos, como T. S. Eliot e Ezra Pound, para contextualizar o desenvolvimento de suas premissas artísticas. Em seguida, será abordada a trajetória de Pieter Brueghel — essa parte visa, principalmente, a descoberta de possíveis pontos de contato entre um pintor do período da Renascença e um escritor do início do século XX. No capítulo dedicado à fundamentação teórica, são elencados os critérios adotados no processo de leitura e tradução, tomando como base as ideias de Haroldo de Campos, Paulo Henriques Britto, Henri Meschonnic e Charles Hartman. Nas seções dedicadas a cada poema, discutem-se as especificidades do diálogo que se estabelece entre texto e imagem, além dos desafios e soluções encontrados ao longo do processo de tradução, especialmente no que diz respeito ao uso do enjambement. / [en] This master s thesis features annotated translations of poems by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a prominent author in the North American literary scene whose work is not widely available in Brazil. Prompted by Williams s interest in the visual arts, this thesis focuses on the translation of Williams s poems that were inspired by the paintings of Flemish master Pieter Brueghel (1525-1569). The research begins with a summary biography of Williams, describing his relationships with contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, in order to contextualize the development of his artistic vision. Next, Brueghel s life and work are discussed, in part to discover possible commonalities between a Renaissance painter and an early 20th-century writer and poet. A chapter discussing the thesis s theoretical foundation lists the criteria used to analyze and translate Williams s poems, based on the ideas of Haroldo de Campos, Paulo Henriques Britto, Henri Meschonnic and Charles Hartman. Sections devoted to each poem discuss the various connections between image and text, as well as the challenges and their corresponding solutions throughout the translation process, particularly regarding Williams s use of enjambment.

The thesis commences an examination of Williams's divided nature and conflicted personality. The connection between the "hidden core" of Williams's life claimed in the Autobiography and his repressed sexual desire as divulged in his poetry is primarily concerned. From Chapter Two to Chapter Four, I attempt to demonstrate that Williams, in the poetic world, finds an outlet to release the suppression of his desire. Especially in his earlier poetry imbued with the poet's highly autobiographical elements, written from 1909 to1939, Williams projects his repressed sexual desire unto the images of nature, woman and little girl. In an essay "Vortex," Williams argues that he is entitled to take any object or even the entire world as a vehicle for self-expression. I employ this argument for approaching Williams's nature poems. The image of female can be deemed as one of the cardinal subjects in Williams's poetry. In exploring Williams's poems about women and little girls, I have two main concerns: first, I examine how he constructs the sexy nature of varied women to dissimulate his erotic nature and projection; second, I inspect how he deconstructs the innocence of little girls so as to exonerate his adult sexual deviation. The thesis concludes with a brief comparison between Williams and some contemporary poets for affirming the uniqueness of his sensual and even erotic nature as a Modernist poet. In a word, Williams is inspired to write poetry by the strong impulse of his repressed sexual desire.

Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2007. / Document formatted into pages; contains v, 53 p. Includes bibliographical references.

This survey follows the development of working-class poetry from Whitman to contemporary poets. It begins by considering how the need for working-class poetry emerged. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” sought to democratize poetry both my challenging previous poetic formal conventions and broadening the scope of included subjects. Williams also challenged formal expectations, but both were limited by their historical and socioeconomic position. To combat this, I include the twentieth-century poets Ignatow and Levine who began in the working class so they could speak truths that had not been published before. Ignatow includes the phrase “dream of completion” which encapsulates various feelings of the working class. This dream could include moments of temporary leisure, but also feeling completed by societal acceptance or understanding. Finally, I include the contemporary poets Laux, Addonizio, and Espada. They complicate the “dream of completion” narrative with issues surrounding gender and race, and do not seek to find resolution.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that the metaphor of taste, which represents aesthetic discernment as gustatory sensation, foregrounds ideologically laden questions of individual and cultural identity across a wide swath of literary history. But critics have yet to discover that taste is but one component of a much broader network of metaphors that figure the mind as a human body that eats and digests the world of objects and ideas. Using two approaches to metaphor from cognitive science, Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of "conceptual blending," I relate metaphors like reading-is-eating, ideas-are-food, and contemplation-is-digestion within a metaphor system that I call "the digesting mind." Applying this insight to organic aesthetics, I argue that poets expand organicism's metaphorical basis beyond the familiar poem-as-plant by introducing a mind that consumes plantlike poems. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman, and William Carlos Williams link writers and readers in an ideational economy figured as nutritional exchange. As each poet negotiates questions of creativity and literary influence, his biological, philosophical, political, and aesthetic beliefs converge in metaphors of the digesting mind. After introducing my approach in chapter one, I examine the digesting mind's importance in the evolution of organic aesthetics from English romanticism to American modernism. In chapter two, the digesting mind destabilizes Coleridge's influential distinction between mechanism and organicism by revealing, in Biographia Literaria, his anxiety that a diet of mechanistic literature will reduce the organic mind to a machine. Chapter three reads Wordsworth's Prelude in similar terms, as an allegory representing mental development as nutritional growth, in which the imagination requires an organic diet of poetry and nature. In chapter four, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Americanizes the digesting mind with an Emersonian aesthetic that locates power in the poet’s present transformation of the literary past into future mental nourishment. In chapter five, Williams adapts Emerson's digesting mind with a pragmatic aesthetics of experience. By representing his Objectivist poems as fruit, as in "This is Just to Say," Williams relocates the organic ideals of vitality and unity from the poem, as aesthetic object, to the audience's felt experience of reading-as-eating. / 2017-11-04T00:00:00Z

La tension analysée par Leo Marx dans son essai The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral ideal in America (1964), entre l’Arcadie américaine comme terre de pureté naturelle et le trope de la menace mécanique, sous-tend les œuvres des deux poètes du XXe siècle que nous nous proposons ici d’étudier, William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) et Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). Leur abondante correspondance est la trace d’une relation poétique mais aussi filiale : Pater-Son, pour jouer sur le titre du long poème de Williams. Cet échange épistolaire vient également remettre en question la périodisation des mouvements littéraires trop souvent conçue comme une série de ruptures. L’état du New Jersey, Garden State, dont ils sont tous deux originaires, jardin dévasté par la révolution industrielle, apparaît comme un terrain fertile au surgissement d’une langue unique et autochtone. Cet espace commun et métamorphique offrira également une échappatoire à l’impasse de la classification des œuvres : du modernisme à la Beat Generation. Il faudra donc revenir sur les délinéaments des tracés cartographiques pour mieux dessiner à notre tour la carte poétique de leur relation littéraire et personnelle. Au gré des passions humaines, extases et tribulations, les poètes arpentent les sillons du vers qu’ils creusent à même le sol de leur New Jersey natal, pour faire sourdre le flot autochtone d’une poésie résolument américaine. / The tensions analyzed by Leo Marx in his 1964 essay The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the pastoral ideal in America, between the American Arcadia as a land of original purity and the trope of industrial threat is ghostly present throughout the works of both poets at stake in this dissertation: William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) and Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997). In this research I intend to analyze the processes by which the poets manage to claim ownership of their land in spite of the lurking mechanic apocalypse. Writing, each in his own time, both poets endeavor to reclaim the original historical and spatial meaning of their continent, by devising an autochthonous language that would provide a new “point of view” and a new “point of voice”, as means to prophesy a collective future for the nation from their personal “local” anchorage in their natal New Jersey. Striving to “make a start out of particulars” they intend to escape the vastness of the continent by focusing on the minute details surrounding them in their own garden state. The correspondence between the two poets also questions the periodization of literary movements, too often conceived as a series of breaks and schisms. The Garden State, metamorphic space covered with the remnants of industrialization provides us with a way to break free from the shackles of such categorization : from modernism to the Beat Generation.

Critics often credit Ezra Pound and his Imagist movement for the development of American poetics. Pound’s interest in international arts and minimalist aesthetics of cross-cultural poetry gained the attention of prominent writers throughout Modernist and Post-Modern periods. From writers like Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein to later poets like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, image and precise language has shaped American literature. Few critics have praised Eastern cultures or the Imagist poets who adopted an East-Western form of poetics: Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Studying traditional Eastern painting and short-form poetry and interactions with personal connections to the East, Lowell and Williams adapt then progress aesthetic fusions Pound began and abandoned through his interpretation of Eastern art. Like Pound, Lowell and Williams illustrate a mix of form, free-verse language, and modernized poetics to not only imitate Eastern art but to create poetics of international discourse which shape American Modernism.

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ABSTRACT This study focuses on twenty-one particular texts published in 1925 as contemporaries of The Great Gatsby. The manuscript is divided into four categories—The Impressionists, The Experimentalists, The Realists, and The Independents. Among The Impressionists are F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, Willa Cather (The Professor’s House), Sherwood Anderson (Dark Laughter), William Carlos Williams (In the American Grain), Elinor Wylie (The Venetian Glass Nephew), John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer), and William Faulkner (New Orleans Sketches). The Experimentalists are Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans), E. E. Cummings (& aka “Poems 48-96”), Ezra Pound (A Draft of XVI Cantos), T. S. Eliot (“The Hollow Men”), Laura Riding (“Summary for Alastor”), and John Erskine (The Private Life of Helen of Troy). The Realists are Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Edith Wharton (The Mother’s Recompense), Upton Sinclair (Mammonart), Ellen Glasgow (Barren Ground), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), James Boyd (Drums), and Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time). The Independents are Archibald MacLeish (The Pot of Earth) and Robert Penn Warren (“To a Face in a Crowd”). Although these twenty-two texts may in some cases represent literary fragmentations, each in its own way also represents a coherent response to the spirit of the times that is in one way or another cognate to The Great Gatsby. The fact that all these works appeared the same year is special because the authors, if not already famous, would become famous, and their works were or would come to represent classic American literature around the world. The twenty-two authors either knew each other personally or knew each other’s works. Naturally, they were also influenced by writings of international authors and philosophers. The greatest common elements among the poets and fiction writers are their uninhibited interest in sex, an absorbing cynicism about life, and the frequent portrayal of disintegration of the family, a trope for what had happened to the countries and to the “family of nations” that experienced the Great War. In 1925, it would seem, Fitzgerald and many of his writing peers—some even considered his betters—channeled a major spirit of the times, and Fitzgerald did it more successfully than almost anyone.