{"537781":{"#nid":"537781","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Spring and All: The Mirror Phase and a Modernist Imagination","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EThis excerpt is from an essay by Associate Professor Blake Leland, Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and was originally published in \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/web.fu-berlin.de\/phin\/phin76\/p76t8.htm\u0022\u003EPhilologie im Netz\u003C\/a\u003E 76\/2016 (100 - 111),\u0026nbsp;Die Freie Universit\u00e4t. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E: The Mirror Phase and a Modernist Imagination\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThis essay applies a psychoanalytic framework to William Carlos Williams\u2019 critical mid-life attempt, in\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u003C\/em\u003E, to express to himself and for himself his own urgent notion of poetic Imagination. The essay proposes that the qualities Williams attributes to genuine manifestations of the poetic Imagination have their psychical foundations in the mirror phase of primary narcissism. Poem \u201cXXII,\u201d also known as \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d is presented as the exemplary case.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIn 1923 William Carlos Williams made\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u003C\/em\u003E, an urgent, often turgid, volume in which that good New Jersey obstetrician, struggling to accomplish his own rebirth, found a way of doing poetry that would free him and his work from what seemed to him the mechanical repetitions of a played-out tradition. As a record of Williams\u2019 impulse to \u201cmake it new,\u201d\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u003C\/em\u003E\u0026nbsp;is simply one of many Modernist manifestos announcing a salutary demolition, with renaissance to follow. Unlike so many of the others, Williams does not announce an \u201c-ism.\u201d\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/em\u003Emust be partly a response to events in a public world, but its often confused and broken prose does not make for convincing polemic. It does, however, indicate a sense of profound crisis, a genuine urgency.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EIt is generally agreed that that crisis was precipitated by his encounter with the work of his friend Marianne Moore and the publication and reception of T.S.Eliot\u2019s \u003Cem\u003EThe Waste Land\u003C\/em\u003E. While Williams was publishing poems like \u201cTract,\u201d energetic plagiary (to use his term) in the tradition of Whitman, Moore was publishing unique artifacts like \u201cThe Monkeys,\u201d and \u201cThose Various Scalpels.\u201d By his own admission Williams found Moore\u2019s work puzzling, but felt too that she was \u201cof all American writers most constantly a poet\u201d because \u201cher work is invariably from the source from which poetry starts\u201d (\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/web.fu-berlin.de\/phin\/phin76\/p76t8.htm#Williams1971b\u0022\u003EWilliams 1971\u003C\/a\u003E: 145).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThat source is a kind of intention, a willful \u201c\u2018something\u2019\u201d that Williams recognizes but doesn\u2019t quite name (Williams 1971: 144). He knows what to call \u003Cem\u003EThe Waste Land\u003C\/em\u003E, however. It is \u201c\u2018literature\u2019\u201d (Williams 1971: 169), and it is opposed to the imagination, the one force that can \u201crefine\u2026clarify\u2026intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live\u201d ( Williams 1971: 89).) Literature does not see spring as \u201cTHE BEGINNING\u201d in which \u201cTHE WORLD IS NEW\u201d (Williams 1971: 94-95); it sees only a kind of plagiary: \u201cApril is the cruelest month\u2026\u201d It sees tradition absorbing the individual talent.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EI polled my colleagues, asking what was their favorite poem of spring, or what was the first bit of poetry that they associated with spring. E.E. Cummings was popular. Williams was mentioned, and Dylan Thomas, Rilke, Housman. I thought it odd at first that some of the poems from earlier in the English anthology were missing. No one nominated \u201cThe Cuckoo Song\u201d or the first verse of \u201cAlison,\u201d and only one person mentioned the beginning of\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003EThe Canterbury Tales\u003C\/em\u003E. But perhaps it wasn\u2019t so odd. For us the most recent poetic springtime was in fact the blossoming of Modernism, and even when the subject of the poem isn\u2019t spring itself the work of those poets seems somehow akin to spring. Still, the line that was cited most often in my little poll was the one spoken by the nameless corpse, reluctant to be reborn, at the beginning of \u003Cem\u003EThe Waste Land\u003C\/em\u003E. Williams was right to be anxious about Eliot\u2019s influence.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe question I put to my colleagues I put to myself as well. The sequence of my associations went like this: poems of spring,\u0026nbsp;\u003Cem\u003ESpring and All\u003C\/em\u003E, then \u201c\u2026reddish \/ purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy \/ stuff of bushes and small trees\u2026\u201d, then, vividly, poem number\u0026nbsp;\u201cXXII\u201d (also called \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow\u201d):\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Eso much depends\u003Cbr \/\u003Eupon\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Ea red wheel\u003Cbr \/\u003Ebarrow\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Eglazed with rain\u003Cbr \/\u003Ewater\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003Ebeside the white\u003Cbr \/\u003Echickens \u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E(Williams 1971: 138)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ENo blossoms, no singing birds, no slim young trees, but it seems nevertheless an essential poem of spring. More than eighty years after it was first written, and more than thirty-five years since I first read it, it is, like spring, still startling, uncanny, beautiful. For me what is especially striking about this poem is the nearly hallucinatory visual impression it evokes; I don\u2019t mean the arrangement of letters or words on the space of the page (although surely that contributes to its effect), but a vision of the scene. It hasn\u2019t always done so. I vaguely recall being baffled by it the first few times I read it. I wanted to know what depended upon that wheelbarrow; I thought that must be the point of the poem. I found, however, that I was unable to produce a convincing answer to that question; it seemed to me that everything or not much at all depended on the red wheelbarrow. So I focused on its redness, the whiteness of the chickens, the glazing water, all those strong appeals to vision. This enabled me to disentangle the poem from my desire to make some sort of discursive sense of it, and once I had given up on the idea of being able to say what it meant, it became a vivid luminous presence in my imagination.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/web.fu-berlin.de\/phin\/phin76\/p76t8.htm\u0022\u003EContinue reading\u0026nbsp;full essay\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":[{"value":"An essay applying a psychoanalytic framework to William Carlos Williams\u2019 poem"}],"field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003EThis excerpt from an essay by Associate Professor Blake Leland \u201capplies a psychoanalytic framework to William Carlos Williams\u2019 critical mid-life attempt, in\u003C\/em\u003E\u003Cem\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/em\u003E\u201cSpring and All,\u201d\u003Cem\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/em\u003E\u003Cem\u003Eto express to himself and for himself his own urgent notion of poetic Imagination. The essay proposes that the qualities Williams attributes to genuine manifestations of the poetic imagination have their psychical foundations in the mirror phase of primary narcissism. Poem XXII, also known as \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,\u201d is presented as the exemplary case.\u201d\u003C\/em\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"This essay by Associate Professor Blake Leland applies a psychoanalytic framework to William Carlos Williams\u2019 critical mid-life attempt, in Spring and All, to express to himself and for himself his own urgent notion of poetic imagination."}],"uid":"27167","created_gmt":"2016-05-19 14:21:59","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:21:42","author":"Rebecca Keane","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2016-05-19T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2016-05-19T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"537761":{"id":"537761","type":"image","title":"Blake Leland","body":null,"created":"1464282000","gmt_created":"2016-05-26 17:00:00","changed":"1539023628","gmt_changed":"2018-10-08 18:33:48","alt":"Portrait of Blake Leland","file":{"fid":"88895","name":"blakelelandweb_0.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/blakelelandweb_0_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/blakelelandweb_0_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":69117,"path_740":"http:\/\/www.tlwarc.hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/blakelelandweb_0_0.jpg?itok=2e2sGd3P"}}},"media_ids":["537761"],"groups":[{"id":"1281","name":"Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"170297","name":"Blake Leland"},{"id":"3747","name":"literature"},{"id":"3956","name":"poetry"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003ERebecca Keane\u003Cbr \/\u003EDirector of Communications\u003Cbr \/\u003E404.894.1720\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["rebecca.keane@iac.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}