3 - A Pragmatic Approach: Williams and Emerson

Summary

IF UNITARIANISM PROVIDED WILLIAMS with an ethical framework around which he built his career as a poet, it is hard to imagine that Williams had no special interest in Emerson, the figure deemed central in influencing the democratization of the beliefs of the American Unitarian church as it moved into the twentieth century. I suggested in chapter 1 that Emerson is a figure of particular relevance due to his influence upon the modern form of the Unitarian church that Williams had such close associations with in his youth and that a consequence of the influence on Williams of Unitarian idealism is the establishment of a basis for better understanding the “Emersonian bias” that many critics acknowledge exists in Williams’s work. However, the reluctance of critics to advance the idea of Emerson’s direct influence on Williams is understandable since “throughout his writings Williams remains strangely quiet about Emerson.” Charles E. Mitchell, in his thesis on appropriations of Emerson by writers including Williams, cites his agreement with several of those who identify Williams’s Emersonianism, stating “that the parallels between Emerson and Williams suggest that Williams must have read Emerson more deeply than he ever admitted.” He proposes that

[Williams’s] conscious rejection of Emerson as being of no importance may be simply a crafty attempt to mask his real appreciation for a figure who was such a vaunted presence in the literary tradition Williams sought to overturn. (28)

Mitchell does not pursue this possibility, or identify Williams’s and Emerson’s mutual relationship to Unitarianism, but as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, both factors are interrelated. In clarifying the terms of the relationship between these figures it is necessary to highlight specific historical reasons why Williams, throughout the 1920s in particular, would not have been inclined to promote the importance to his own work of Emerson’s example as Mitchell suggests. Furthermore these reasons will place Williams even more firmly in an Emersonian camp, for as Richard Poirier observes,

It is against the spirit of Emerson to conform to a lineage and even less to hold up certain texts as exemplifications of one. So much so that the figures I am looking at most closely in the Emersonian line have actually very little to say about one another.