The (Non)Modern Imagination of a Noisy Williams

Abstract

This article investigates William Carlos Williams's philosophical investment in relational ways of knowing the world by re-reading the poems in his 1923 collection Spring and All through the lens of the poet's prose. Bringing into focus the noisy aesthetic aims that Williams outlines in the prose passages and that are at play in the poems themselves, Spring and All is read not for what it means but for how it means, taking noisy Williams at his word and asking not how poetic language represents but how it mediates. The article extends pragmatist approaches to Williams's poetry by turning to Bruno Latour's theory of (non)modernity and new media theories in order to articulate the poet's interest in the translations and exchanges that occur beneath the binaries that moderns have produced.