A Place to Inscribe All Places: The Spatial Imaginations of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams

• Main Author: Ciaran O'Rourke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece 2018-12-01
• Series: Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media
• Online Access: http://ejournals.lib.auth.gr/ExCentric/article/view/6364

This paper adopts a comparative approach to the poetics of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, exploring the contrasting conceptions of geographical space and national identity these writers formulate in their respective works: Stevens in a transatlantic context, and Williams in an intra-American one. The discussion attends to Wallace Stevens’s understanding of space, specifically as evidenced in his poems about Ireland—a country he never visits in person, but which he still envisions in material, mythological, and poetically catalysing terms. This paper relates such a circumstance to Stevens’s correspondence with the Irish writer and curator Thomas MacGreevy (among others), as well as to the American writer’s theorization of imaginative and geographical space throughout his work. The second section focuses on William Carlos Williams’s efforts to incorporate what he perceives as the facts and dominant themes of Native American experience into his later poetry. Although engaging problematic notions of ethnic and gendered alterity, in contrast to Stevens Williams, he challenges any symbiosis between national and placial identity, invoking images of Native American experience as a means of exposing the faultlines that define American landscapes and localities—from New Jersey to New Mexico.