American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman

by Stephen Tapscott

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Stephen Tapscott is a poet and academic whose work spans poetry, creative writing, and translation. His academic interests focus on North American literature, particularly the works of Walt Whitman and the Anglo-American Modernists, as well as Latin American poetry and world poetries in Russian, German, and Polish. Tapscott is also involved in the study of autobiography, gender studies, queer studies, and the intersection of poetry with visual arts, including photography.
Tapscott has authored five books of poetry and a critical study on the works of Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. In addition to his poetry, he has edited an anthology of Latin American poetry and translated significant works from several languages. His translations include Pablo Neruda's One Hundred Love Sonnets, Jan Twardowski's God Asks for Love, Wisława Szymborska's The End and the Beginning, Gabriela Mistral's Selected Prose and Prose Poems, and works by Attila Boa and Georg Trakl. His contributions to literature are characterized by his cross-cultural approach and deep engagement with diverse poetic traditions.

Reviews

[David Curry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stephen Tapscott’s American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman is more readable than most books of academic literary criticism, but it does not altogether avoid the endemic pitfalls and annoyances of the breed. Where on earth outside academic literary criticism would you ever encounter the word “propaedeutic”? It’s as if there are certain cult words and terms — “chthonic” is another doozie that comes to mind — without which the Modern Language Association will not grant admittance. (“Chthonic” does make a great word for a spelling bee, with the “ch” being silent.) This cultishness isn’t confined to the literary field. In music, in the visual arts and other fields, it too often appears that the academicians are talking to each other and to no one else.

Have you considered the patriarchic and filial implications of the title of Williams’ Paterson? Pater-son. Get it? I winced when Tapscott asked me to go there.

It goes without saying that this is not a book for the general reader. Even for devoted readers of poetry, it requires forbearance. Nonetheless, if you can get through the cultspeak, Tapscott offers a sound analysis of Whitman’s influence on Williams and others and the continuing effort to build on Whitman’s achievement in breaking free of inherited forms and arriving at an authentic and serviceable new poetics.

One of the chief virtues of the book is the abundance of quotations, including this durable and increasingly pertinent passage from Williams’ 1929 essay “The Somnambulists”:

“There is, in a democracy, a limit beyond which thought is not expected to leap. All men being presumed equal, it then becomes an offense if this dead limit be exceeded. But within the opacity which encloses them the American people are bright, active, and efficient … Fear to vary from the average, fear to feel, to see, to know, to experience — save under the opacity of a mist of equality, a mist of commonplace mediocrity, is our character.”

That makes a resounding complement to Thomas Jefferson’s “tyranny of the majority.”