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

Abstract

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.