Modern American Poetry

Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s 265

Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt

that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to

the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which

should give it fruit.^32

The poetry which Williams wrote and sponsored in the twenties was directly
posed against Eliot’s version of Modernism.
Williams and Moore are poets of immanence, anti-Symbolists. For
them meaning inheres primarily in the external world, and their poems
accord to objects a life of their own. They featured and appraised objects
(also animals and other people) in and of themselves, not for what they
represented. Williams said of Moore, “To Miss Moore an apple remains an
apple whether it be in Eden or the fruit bowl where it curls.”^33 There is no
depth of transcendence in their world, no secret, symbolic nature in things,
no hidden correspondences to another world. So, too, for them words were
fundamentally things in themselves, solid objects that match the particular
things they name. Williams writes in Spring and All,“Of course it must be
understood that writing deals with words and words only and that all
discussions of it deal with single words and their associations in groups.” At
the same time words are themselves marked by “the shapes of men’s lives in
places.”^34 Words are objects interacting in their own right which
simultaneously name and parallel the local, external world. This dual sense
of language is the beginning of an Objectivist aesthetic.
To render the external world accurately also meant to break radically
with traditional ways of presenting and describing that world as well as with
traditional or received forms of poetry. The goal was not loveliness but
reality itself. This is the basic premise behind Williams’s claim that
“destruction and creation / are simultaneous.”^35 “Poetry,” Moore’s most
celebrated early poem, begins with the assertion

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important

beyond all this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

discovers in

it after all, a place for the genuine.^36

Moore and Williams are revolutionary poets in the way they destroy
preexisting forms in order to create new ones.
Williams published three books of poems in the twenties: Kora in Hell:
Improvisations(1920), Sour Grapes(1921), and Spring and All(1923). All are