Chapter 30 - Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the East Coast Projectivists

Summary

Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams have often been figured as the authors of a counterculture in American poetry. Pound's attraction to continental culture was by no means restricted to Gallic discernment, and his decision to expatriate figures centrally in his extended debate with Williams about the appropriate course for modern American poetry. Pound's and Williams's essays on each other's work are remarkably perceptive and although their criticism can be severe, their praise, is also genuine. The concept of ideogrammic juxtaposition was integral to the development of an open field method of projectivist composition. Pound imagined poetic vocabulary differently, prizing cheng ming, the principle of the rectification of names, which points to the revelatory clarity of words that are, so to speak, unwobbling pivots. The stylistic distinction between Pound and Williams as incipient open form poets relevant to projectivist writers is a matter of individualized structures and distinctive rhythms.