"Death is no answer": Trauma and Myth in Williams's Kora in Hell and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

abstract:This article aims to reconcile William Carlos Williams's emulation of Ezra Pound's tenet "make it new" with the seemingly antithetical underworld myth that pervades his poetry. Interpreting Kora in Hell and "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" through the lens of trauma theory permits readers to locate hell in a space that is simultaneously subjective, and therefore new, but which also provides a systematic understanding of violence and death in his work. Kora and "Asphodel" thus draw mythic unity from this latter quality, rather than from the traditional association of Kora and the underworld with Greco-Roman myth narratives canonized in Western literature. Through the trauma reading of these texts, it is shown how the subjective hell myth provides Williams with an indirect language for re-integration after the experience of trauma. Subjective myth thus provides a way to speak around trauma as a therapeutic alternative to speechlessness.