Dialectical Images: William Carlos Williams's Avant-Garde Poetry

William Carlos Williams discovers important sources of inspiration in the revolutionary avant-garde movements, in particular, Dada and Surrealism and attempted to embody the innovations in them in his poetic theory and practice. Williams's passion to create an indigenous American poetic work is compatible with his Dadaist experimentation with objets trouvés. Williams pays deep attention to objets trouvés, physical objects and marginalized people he comes across and transcribes his observations with poetic words freed from their instrumental contexts. In his characteristic poems written in the 1920s and 1930s, Williams records the social ruination and his task to give voice to the conflictual and fragmentary character of modernity is pursued through the Surrealist formulation of montage. In the Surrealist formulation of montage, the dialectical image is a central trope for reading the myth of modernity; it is positioned as both subject and object in the historiographic narratives of Walter Benjamin and Williams. As Benjamin tries to obliterate all traces of the author in the Arcades Project, Williams's montage poems like Spring and All only disperse argument into materialistic, dialectical images. The dialectical image in Williams's poetics becomes an organon of historical awakening so that truth can emerge from an unmediated juxtaposition of "things."