Autochthonous oralities and coral islands: imagining “the people” in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the Southern Fugitives

ABSTRACT

This paper returns to early twentieth-century America’s concern with democracy and “the local” in order to frame the populist parameters of poetic appeals to “the people” in the work of the Southern Fugitive poets on the one hand, and William Carlos Williams on the other. It argues that the Southern Fugitives’ commitment to what Chantal Mouffe identifies as a populist politics of antagonism runs counter to Williams’s very different attempt to grapple with the idea of “the people.” The Fugitives’ claims to a form of constitutional autochthony depended upon the violent exclusion of Native and African-American “uninhabitants”: the negative requirement for the decidedly populist continuation and preservation of what Allen Tate explicitly called “White rule.” By contrast, Williams’s more self-reflexive lyrical voice foregrounds the epistemological limitations of the poetic imagination and hence the problematic maneuvers by which a “people” may be conscripted into the service of populist national allegories.

KEYWORDS:

• Twentieth-century American poetry
• Fugitive poets
• William Carlos Williams
• populism
• localism
• race
• immigration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See, passim, Karanikas, Tillers, Kalaidjian, Edge, and Clark, “Genealogy.”

² Nixon, “Unimagined Communities,” 63.

³ Tate, quoted in Kalaidjian, “Specters of Commitment,” 149.

⁴ Mouffe, “The ‘End of Politics',” 51.

⁵ Laclau, “Populism: What’s in a Name?” 47, 48.

⁶ Nixon, “Unimagined Communities,” 64.

⁷ Schlesinger Jr., Disuniting, 30.

⁸ Ibid., 35–6.

⁹ Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 190–4.

¹⁰ The melting pot metaphor for American identity may be traced back to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1759). Crèvecoeur imagined the American as “a new man, who acts upon new principles,” and presented America as a place in which “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race.” (See de Crèvecoeur, “What Is an American?” 55.)

¹¹ Damrosch, “What Is World Literature?” 9.

¹² Casanova, Republic of Letters.

¹³ Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” 337–41.

¹⁴ Eliot, “Tradition,” 39.

¹⁵ Ransom, “Forms and Citizens,” 42.

¹⁶ Ransom, Selected Poems, 30.

¹⁷ Ibid., 38.

¹⁸ I am thinking of Simon Schama’s remarks about Blut und Boden in relation to Anselm Kiefer’s Hermanns-Schlacht. For Kiefer, as Schama suggests, myths of blood and soil are not simply peculiar to Nazi Germany, but have the potential to take root in democratic societies. “Democracy, [Kiefer] seems to say, averts its face from these myths at its peril.” (Schama, “Der Holzweg,” 133.)

¹⁹ Ransom, Selected Poems, 11, 83.

²⁰ Ibid., 83.

²¹ These tropes are present, for example, in Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” where “Autumn is desolation in the plot/of a thousand acres where these memories grow/From the inexhaustible bodies that are not/Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row” (see Collected Poems, 20–3, 20).This is an implicit restatement of the argument that broods quietly beneath the surface of Ransom’s “Antique Harvesters.”

²² Davidson, Poems, 73.

²³ Ibid., 71.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2–3.

²⁶ Davidson, Poems, 73.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 5.

²⁹ Tate, Collected Poems, 607.

³⁰ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 125.

³¹ Owsley, quoted in Kalaidjian, “Specters of Commitment,” 149.

³² Cashin, “Landscape and Memory in Antebellum Virginia,” 477.

³³ Ibid., 481.

³⁴ Donaldson, ed., I’ll take My Stand, xliii, xlv–xlviii.

³⁵ Kalaidjian, “Specters of Commitment,” 149.

³⁶ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ix.

³⁷ Ibid., 166.

³⁸ Bonikowski, “Ethno-nationalist Populism,” 20.

³⁹ Armstrong, Modernism, 33.

⁴⁰ Williams, Selected Poems, 53.

⁴¹ Foucault, The Order of Things, 57.

⁴² Williams, Selected Poems, 53–4.

⁴³ Foucault, The Order of Things, 199.

⁴⁴ Williams, Selected Poems, 54.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 55.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ For a similar account of the problem of collective representation see Johnston, “Toward the Schizo-Text,” 69.

⁴⁸ Williams, Selected Poems, 15.

⁴⁹ Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 47; and Williams, Selected Poems, 15.

⁵⁰ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 38, 138.

⁵¹ Ibid., 71.

⁵² Williams, Selected Poems, 62.

⁵³ Mouffe, “The ‘End of Politics,’” 51.

⁵⁴ This is not to suggest that Williams’s unwillingness to sustain the reductive binary between “the people” and “the State” offers an adequate solution to the problem. Indeed, Williams’s thinking here is uncertain enough to suggest that he had begun to grasp a problem later identified by Chantal Mouffe: “There is … a striking convergence between the lack of effective alternatives offered to citizens in advanced industrial societies and the lack of an adequate theoretical grasp of the complex relationship existing between democracy and liberalism” (“The ‘End of Politics,’” 54).

⁵⁵ Ramos, “Cultural Identity,” 102.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity, 154. Ahearn’s reading is particularly germane to the broader interests of this paper, but it is worth noting that Williams’s remarks about “coral” shift gradually away from the early preoccupation with community or the “American Grain,” with which I am here principally concerned, and toward more academic or formalist concerns. For further details of alternative, less politically oriented readings of the poem, see Metzler Sawin, “Making Contact,” 331–53. For details of Williams’s later deployment of coral in “The Descent of Winter,” see Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, and Bremen, William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture.

⁵⁸ Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity, 154.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 155.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 156.

⁶¹ Ibid., 155.

⁶² Ibid.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Nixon, “Unimagined Communities,” 62.

⁶⁵ Williams, Selected Poems, 39.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 40.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon van Schalkwyk

Simon van Schalkwyk is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His research focuses on the tensions between the local and the global in transnational modernisms, with a particular emphasis on twentieth-century and contemporary American fiction, “World” literature, and poetry. He also serves as the Academic Editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books.