In the American Grain

by William Carlos Williams, Rick Moody (Introduction)

A new edition of William Carlos Williams’ loving and groundbreaking book about American history, with a new introduction by Rick Moody. Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is “a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature” ( Times Literary Supplement ). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus’s discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, History, Literature, Classics, American

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

A short note for those who may have an interest ::

William Carlos Williams’ 1925 essay collection ought to be read as supplementary by those reading William T Vollmann’s Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. It is a compact attempt to survey an american spirit by way of its history. And more than the mere sweep collected in this slim volume, and Williams’ concern with the what and wherefore of what being american is all about, are his stylistic choices, mimicking the subject in its own voice, using the subject’s own voice, writing from and out of the source documents themselves. Williams’ choices of style, form, and voice should be familiar to Vollmann readers. Which choices also create a dense reading experience, always somewhere between essay and story, where it belongs. Prior familiarity with the subject of each piece is required in order to see exactly where Williams wants to place himself, as essayist, within the questions of the time; when a writer ventriloquizes, there is no easy route to discover merely that “which he wants to say.” But, too, there is the innocent hearing of what is said, as it is said, in the manner in which it is said.

Red Eric -- Chris Columbus -- Cortez and what happened at Tenochtitlan -- Ponce de Leon -- De Soto -- Sir Walter Raleigh -- the mayflower -- de Champlain -- Thomas Morton -- Cotton Mathers and some wonderful witches -- Daniel Boone -- Washington -- Poor Richard -- John Paul Jones -- Aaron Burr -- Poe and even a final page on Lincoln. more.

The names will be familiar to readers of Vollmann; yes, that is where my head is right now. More importantly, those names should be much more familiar to the average american citizen than they are to me; I mean of course that I know the names but I’ll be damned if I could tell a decent story about most of them.

It occurs to me as well, dear readers of fiction, that the territory which Williams covers, in addition to all which makes me think of Seven Dreams, also overlaps with another great series of historical novels by another Great American, Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We are, too, the others. Think of them! The main islands were thickly populated with a peaceful folk when Christ-over found them. But the orgy of blood which followed, no man had written. We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world. Indians have no souls; that was it. That was what they said. But they knew they lied—the blood-smell proof."

Those who struggle with the separation of "author" from "text", or, more specifically, the distance between the "ideas" and "views" of an author, and those in his texts, may have problems with this book (and a brief online search demonstrates this).

This is written in the book, can we criticise WCW for being a misogynist?

"Women—givers (but they have been, as reservoirs, empty) perhaps they are being filled now. Hard to deal with in business, more conservative, closer to earth—the only earth. They are our cattle, cattle of the spirit—not yet come in. None yet has raised benevolence to distinction. Not one to "wield her beauty as a scepter." It is a brilliant opportunity."

Can we claim anything about WCW's "beliefs" from this book? Do we care anyway? Even if there is a "thesis" being put forward by WCW, does it matter?

The fact that one cannot clearly differentiate between when "WCW is speaking" (whatever that means) and when it is the voice of his characters, should do nothing but make clear such a differentiation is meaningless.

Simple point being - nuance people, nuance...

Anyway. No idea why I bothered to write that, nor what I am rambling about.

Much to like here. An ancestor of Paul Metcalf and Vollmann certainly. Helpful too for those of us interested in trying to understand more of that very strange thing that is the USA. Some great writing, some that gets a little muddled and muddied.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are the slaughterers. It is the tortured soul of our world. Indians have no souls; that was it. That was what they said. But they knew they lied—the blood-smell proof.

Dr. Williams had something to say here. He usually did. He gave us episodic prose poems about the founding --whatever the hell that means-- of this strange country. He can be judged by our 1922 filters. I fear that is missing the point. His frustration with the Babbits of the land forced his hand. Williams mined his Parkman for quotes. He didn't mince words about the Conquest, Imperialism or Racial Sin. He called Alexander Hamilton "a balloon of malice" and his thoughts on Jefferson and Lincoln are highly curious. The doctor both laments and thunders. I certainly found it a success, taking to task foundation myths isn't an easy business. His lingering over Poe is compelling.

[Emily]

William Carlos Williams's essay collection—or long prose poem—or piece of imaginative nonfiction—call it what you will, In the American Grain attempts to inhabit some of the great personalities of American history, in a bid to explore the underpinnings of the collective American psyche. Williams approaches his subjects, who range from Viking cast-out Eric the Red, through Columbus and Daniel Boone and finishing up with a brief sketch of Abraham Lincoln, from a variety of angles, including quotations from primary sources, real or imaginary debates between contemporary (1920s) speakers, fictionalized monologues in the style of the subject's time and place, and poetic dissertations on the ongoing demons of our New World society.

I know a common opinion is that the "point" of a "review" is to give an impression of whether one liked a book or not. So I'll be up front about this: I'm really not sure whether I hated In the American Grain, or whether I quite liked it. I spent most of the duration of the book arguing with Williams, either spluttering with pen in hand, or grudgingly admitting his points—sometimes even cheering him on. The time I wasn't spending thus, I was appreciating the stylistic breadth of the book, and by extension, of American history and literature. All in all, there could be worse ways to spend a reading interlude than locked in debate with an opponent like Williams.

First, the things that I wholeheartedly enjoyed about the book: as noted, Williams makes use of many primary sources throughout In the American Grain, and incorporates them in different ways: sometimes he quotes directly from them; at others, he refers to them in supposed conversation, in yet other cases, he adopts the "voice" of the ship's log, religious treatise, diary, or autobiography in question and uses it in his own monologue on a subject. In a move reminiscent of The Waste Land, there is no clear marker to let the reader know when Williams is quoting verbatim and when he is mimicking a historical voice, so I'm not sure where I should congratulate him on good collage-work, where on good composition, and to what extent the division between those two doesn't even matter. Whether Williams's role is primarily that of a composer or an editor, though, the end result is a chewy combination of prose styles that captures the changing texture of American letters through the centuries. Some of my favorite bits from this milieu, just to give a sense of the variety here:

The opening sentences of the book, in the voice of Eric the Red:

Better the ice than their way: to take what is mine by single strength, theirs by the crookedness of their law. But they have marked me—even to myself.

From the chapter on Sir Walter Raleigh:

O Muse, in that still pasture where you dwell amid the hardly noticed sounds of water falling and the little cries of crickets and small birds, sing of Virginia floating off: the broken chips of Raleigh: the Queen is dead.



O Virginia! who will gather you again as Raleigh had you gathered?

From Cotton Mather's monologue:

The New Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the earth for his Possession.

I am very drawn to stylistic experimentation, and I admire Williams's project here. He's trying to establish the history of American speech, American thought, as distinct from that of Europe. In one of the conversational sections, he claims that Americans don't realize

that there is a source in AMERICA for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral, since we recognize no ground our own. [...:] And that we have no defense, lacking intelligent investigation of the changes worked upon the early comers here, to the New World, the books, the records..."

By examining, even inhabiting those same books and records, Williams hopes to provide himself and his readers with a sense of the very historical ground they are already unknowingly occupying.

But the focus on books and records also creates a methodological problem for Williams, or at least exaggerate one to which he is already prone. Because who, in pre-Revolutionary America, LEFT books and records? Why, it was the the educated white men (and a few educated white women, with whom Williams does not concern himself). Williams's emphasis on primary sources means that he privileges those who operated in a mode of writing down their experiences—which means that, for example, as much as he attempts sympathy for the American Indian, his take on the Native presence in the New World is woefully ethnocentric and romanticized—in a way that's, ironically, very Rousseau-esque, very European. Similarly, his attitude toward women and the feminine is bizarrely male-centric, especially considering that he's happy enough to name-drop such contemporary American female artists as H.D., Bryher, and Gertrude Stein when he mentions his six-week trip to Paris. Normally I'm pretty good at considering an author's work in the context of his time, but for some reason, possibly because Williams's big goal here is to advance a particular view of American history, I was roused to ardent disagreement with him. It was passages like this, on Daniel Boone:

There must be a new wedding. But he saw and only he saw the prototype of it all, the native savage. To Boone the Indian was his greatest master. Not for himself surely to be an Indian, though they eagerly sought to adopt him into their tribes, but the reverse: to be himself in a new world, Indianlike. If the land were to be possessed it must be as the Indian possessed it. Boone saw the truth of the Red Man, not an aberrant type, treacherous and anti-white to be feared and exterminated, but as a natural expression of the place...

or this:

The land! don't you feel it? Doesn't it make you want to go out and lift dead Indians tenderly from their graves, to steal from them—as if it must be clinging even to their corpses—some authenticity...

STEAL THE AUTHENTICITY FROM THE DEAD INDIANS' CORPSES??? Dr. Williams, may I just say, "Eww"?

So much about these passages rub me the wrong way. I know it's only fair to look at Williams in context; the 1920s was a pretty bleak time for Native American/white relations. Still a decade away from the relatively enlightened tenure of John Collier as head of the Office of Indian Affairs, the United States Government was busy convincing the American public that the Indians were morally corrupt heathens who should be deprived of their remaining land and have their liquid property "put into trust"—aka stolen. The counter-argument advanced by well-meaning liberals was that the Indians, once a mass of noble savages, were now on the verge of an inevitable extinction (Williams says that "almost nothing remains of the great American New World but a memory of the Indian"), and that, instead of killing off the remnants of them for sport like the frontiersmen were doing in the West, white folks should look to the romantic past for lessons to be learned from this bygone race of "natural," "primitive" people. (Yet if the Abenaki disappeared before 1922, why do they currently have a website?) Indians became the desirable "other" in the progressive imagination, everything white men were not: natural, authentic, in harmony with their surroundings, untouched by cultural repression. Because Williams hates the Puritans, because he hates their refusal to "touch," their fear of contamination, their sexual frigidity, their artifice, he imagines a homogeneous mass of Indian civilization to which none of these things apply. It is easier to imagine these things, of course, if one never has to come into contact with an actual Indian, who might, being human, have her own complex set of hangups and cultural standards.

And so Williams himself becomes an example of the Puritanical refusal to reach out and touch the "other." He romanticizes, most of all, white men who have been close to the Indians: the priest Rasles, who lived with the Abenaki, Kentucky frontiersman Daniel Boone; Texas governor Samuel Houston, who "descended" to live with the Chippewa until his "reascension" into white society. But no Indian subjectivity is on offer here, no Indian biography told. "They" are not "us"; they are not the story of America. Williams does not attempt to inhabit Metacom, Tecumseh, or even Moctezuma in the same way he inhabits Columbus or Franklin, just as he never attempts to voice a woman for longer than two sentences. He idolizes white male individuals who are able to live among the natives, who have opinions about them, who have sex with them, and thinks it the most noble thing imaginable when white individuals refrain from killing native ones. But he very seldom presents a native person as an individual: the only times he does (Moctezuma and Jacataqua) they're either submitting to white authority or freeing a white man from the sexual prudery of Puritanical white women. And let's not get started on the fact that his primary problem with the Puritanical repression of white women is that they're no longer able sexually to satisfy white men. Or actually, let's.

Women—givers (but they have been, as reservoirs, empty) perhaps they are being filled now. Hard to deal with in business, more conservative, closer to earth—the only earth. They are our cattle, cattle of the spirit—not yet come in. None yet has raised benevolence to distinction. Not one to "wield her beauty as a scepter." It is a brilliant opportunity.

Watch me run to cash in on this "brilliant opportunity" to be a "cow of the spirit."

I mean, I'm no fan of the Puritans' sexual mores and white supremacist doctrines, don't get me wrong. And Williams's sentimental belief in the noble savage is certainly preferable to the opinion that all Indians should be killed as soon as possible, or that decent women should be devoid of sexuality. But the way he uses the Indians and women (and later, "all the negroes [he:] has known intimately") as a crow-bar between himself and the Puritan ideology is extremely problematic to me. The frustrating thing, and one reason I have a hard time forgiving him these faults, is that he seems smarter than that, too smart and too cosmopolitan to fall victim to these predictable traps. He knows Stein; he knows Joyce; he knows Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier and H.D. He occasionally dances so close to acknowledging the subjectivity of women and people of color, and yet he always steps back from the brink. In the "Jacataqua" section, for example, in the midst of passages like the one quoted above, he says this:

She is a low thing (they tell her), she is made to feel that she is vicious, evil—It really doesn't do anything save alter the color of her deed, make it unprofitable, it scrapes off the bloom of the gift—it is puritanical envy. When she gives, it will probably be to the butcher boy—since she has been an apt pupil and believes that she is evil, believes even that her pleasure is evil.

For just a moment there, we see a human being convinced of her own malignancy, worn down by a sexual double-standard. But Williams then quickly springs back to his main concern, lamenting the effects of American white female frigidity on white American men. And white EDUCATED men at that, given his contempt for the butcher boy, which is a little ironic considering how many more people got educated in early America than in England due to those pesky Puritans and their mandated free public schools. Basically, his attitude reads, "It makes me so ANGRY that white American women are so frigid and can't sexually satisfy white American men!! The poor white American men are going CRAZY for lack of sexual satisfaction! (And incidentally, I guess it sucks that white American women have been taught that they're dirty whores, but mostly) it's just tragic that lack of sexual generosity is keeping white American men from realizing their true potential!" The destructive effects of Puritanism on the human psyches of the women in question (terrorism), or on the native peoples (genocide) is never as important to Williams as the inconvenience to white American men.

I know it's unrealistic to apply modern political mores to works from the past, but other folks in the 1920s were doing so much better than this. Hell, for my money Longfellow did better than this all the way back in 1855 with the "Song of Hiawatha." And that's disappointing in a book that promises so much in its style and its premise.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curious book. Very much of its time (1925), a time of the first great vogue for speculating on the savage subconscious of the nation--witness D.H. Lawrence's 'Studies in Classic American Literature,' and the Melville revival. (It is amusing when Williams dismisses the Augustan elegancies of an 18th century account of Daniel Boone as 'silly language'--his own quasi-Nietzschean vitalist rhapsodies are now just as dated as those pompous periods of Johnsonese.) Williams meditates on what are to him key episodes and figures in the New World's enthopsychic secret history, from Eric the Red to Lincoln. He gets carried away sometimes, to no good effect, and the prose can be at times unreadably silly--but just as often it rises to an awesome pitch of revelation and insight. I like it when poets riff on incidents of history; they can compress a pithy essence better than the less speculative historians. My favorite bits:

1. When describing the massacres of Indians who refused to spiritually convert or politically submit, Williams mourns that Tenochtitlan was 'crushed out because of the awkward names [King of Spain, Jesus Christ] men give their emptiness.'

2. 'Indians have no souls; that was it. That was what they said. But they knew they lied--the blood-smell proof.'

3. The religious legacy of Puritanism: 'strange, inhuman, powerful...like a relic of some died out tribe whose practices were revolting.'

4. Boone 'has remained since buried in a miscolored legend and left for rotten.'

5. Boone was not of 'that riff-raff of hunters and Indian killers among which destiny had thrown him--the man of border foray--a link between savage and settler.'

6. Sam Houston, 'a man of primitive vigors loosed upon her in private.'

7. In precarious frontier settlements, women 'shooting children against the wilderness like cannon balls.'

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Williams requires American culture to be shared (it isn’t) and parochial (it shouldn’t be).

[Madison Santos · Rating 1 out of 5]

im not sure why i thought that the ezra and co.'s racism wouldnt rub off on WCW but jeez, even as one of his devotees, i cant stand this.

i get that WCW was always self-conscious about his status as the modernist that got left behind, and feels ashamed that he is not able to pull from a well of cultural mythology like joyce or pound can so he feels the need to create one, this is why he dwells needlessly on his six weeks in paris... but does that mythology need an origin story of sir walter raleigh bravely colonizing? does it need to ignore indigenous americans besides two sentences? does it need only a 4 page chapter titled "The Advent of Slaves" after a 30 page eulogy to burr with the most aggravatingly bland title "The Virtue of History"? does it need to claim that slaves were brought over on ships to america just like everyone else? WCW's mythography is hidden behind two genocides and i really hope vollmann's seven dream trilogy does much better than WCW could.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

ambitious enough to be enjoyable but doesn’t really seem to know what to do with itself. kind of a half assed attempt at a biblical canon of the American character, punctuated here and there by wcw’s idiosyncratic prose, reminding you that you are in fact reading a pseudo historical tract by someone who was a poor historian and an excellent poet

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Williams' book of essays on America is a collage of documents, reflections, and pastiches that illuminates the country's history in a way that stands outside the received truths of the age in which it was written and the churning revisions of today. This America was founded on blood, betrayal, and pillage but the myths of any nation's making are never as simple as their telling. There are villains in this grain -- Cotton Mather, Cortez -- and others who, if not heroes, are at least admirable in some of their attributes -- Burr, Poe. The language weaves it all together, poetry with rhetorical syntax, illuminating without belaboring, mostly even-handed.

Except for those puritans. They really messed us up!

I'm glad a friend loaned me this book. It really should be required reading for any student of American history.

[Mat · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating one-of-a-kind book. William Carlos Williams' groundbreaking classic, In the American Grain, is partly a primer on American history in which he focuses on certain select individuals who had some historical influence in shaping the nation of the United States or who came to represent the country in some iconic but not necessarily accurate way. Therefore, this book is also partly a historiography in which Williams goes back to the source materials (such as Columbus' journal) in an attempt to get a raw, 'warts-and-all' account of what really happened.

Of course Williams himself, unavoidably, injects his own 'subjective' views of these historical figures into his chapters / vignettes, which automatically throws the veracity of these accounts into jeopardy, if not right out the window. However, his style of writing IS compelling and we feel Williams trying to embody these characters or the times (see the chapter on Cortez and Montezuma as a good example) in order to flesh out a more accurate and gritty portrait of what might have happened and what kind of person these people were. Williams does seem to portray many of these people, such as Sir Walter Raleigh, dispassionately, revealing both their strengths and inherent weaknesses, something which is often swept under the carpet (to put it lightly) or left out of traditional history textbooks all together.

The major repercussions for the American reader upon reading this book, I felt, were that it would make you reassess what it truly means to be an 'American' and what is the true meaning of a 'hero' if such a thing exists in the first place. As I am not American and know very little about American history, this book would probably be less 'confronting' to a non-American to read than an American who has any drop of patriotism in his/her blood.

I'm pretty sure that Williams pissed a lot of people off when he wrote and published this book but I'm sure he probably felt 'to hell with them all!' and I've got to admire that - his courage, his vision and his aim of revisiting certain moments in American history through a non-patriotic, more objective viewpoint. If I were on the Board of Education in the US, I would make this compulsory reading for all high school students - it's that important.

So why only four stars you may ask? Well, although I am usually a HUGE fan of Williams' prose (even more than his poetry - check out his fantastic White Mule for example and the rest of the Joe Stecher triology in fact), I did not always like the style in this book. It was at times repetitious and obscure and slightly tedious (especially the chapter on Salem and the 'witch hunts' that took place there).

However, all things considered, the IMPORTANCE of this book far outweighs any flaws in Williams' style so I still highly recommend this book. I feel that this book should be read at least once in your lifetime, especially if you are an American and if you are interested in some of the key historical figures who not only helped shape the nation (such as George Washington) but who also came to definitively embody the so-called 'American spirit' (Daniel Boone is a good example).

Go get it and enjoy it! You won't regret it.

[Brian]

c.f. Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below

It has become "the most lawless country in the civilized world," a panorama of murders, perversions, a terrific ungoverned strength, excusable only because of the horrid beauty of its great machines. To-day it is a generation of gross know-nothingism, of blackened churches where hymns groan like chants from stupefied jungles, a generation universally eager to barter permanent values (the hope of an aristocracy) in return for opportunist material advantages, a generation hating those whom it obeys. [68]

I said, It is an extraordinary phenomenon that Americans have lost the sense, being made up as we are, that what we are has its origin in what the nation in the past has been; that there is a source in America for everything we think or do; that morals affect the food and food the bone, and that, in fine, we have no conception at all of what is meant by moral, since we recognize no ground our own—and that this rudeness rests all upon the unstudied character of our beginnings; and that if we will not pay heed to our own affairs, we are nothing but an unconscious porkyard and oil-hole for those, more able, who will fasten themselves upon us. [108-9]

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of historical and literary pastiche. An impressive technical feat of writing. Williams very artfully adopts the cadence and register of a range of historical writings. Starts off extremely strong. But for me the work lost most its steam after the first third, and rarely rallied thereafter.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't speak to me. I had a hard time catching the rhythm of the language; I didn't always know what he meant, no matter how many times I reread sections.

He lets the Spanish explorers off easy--Columbus, De Soto, Ponce de Leon, even Cortez are all men who came to the New World drawn by their visions, their ambitions, their desires, and they got swallowed and defeated by the New World, in one way or another. The Puritans, however, get his full wrath. Maybe he respects the Spaniards more, for at least attempting to see the "flower" of the New World, its glories and pleasures, whereas the Puritans, who similarly annihilated indigenous people and plundered the land as their own, maintained their own littleness and refused to be seduced, and instead turned inward.

The idea of the book is great: to pick out elements of history to reform, to recreate, but to understand for the first time. There are some good things to quote here:

Page 69: "Is it merely in a book? So am I then, merely in a book. You see? Here at least I find the thing I love. I mean, here *is* the thing, accurately, my own world, the world in which I myself breathe and walk and live--against that which you present."

Page 113: "Why does one not hear Americans speak more of these important things? Because the fools do not believe that they have sprung from anything: bone, thought and action. They will not see that what they are is growing on these roots. They will not look. They float without question. Their history is to them an enigma."

And this gorgeous bit of mansplaining, pg. 184, describing his correspondence with "one of the hottest women that [he] know[s]": "I liked her and enjoyed her letters. In one letter, among other things, she said that no one could *imagine* what it meant to a girl to lose her virginity. But yes, I could imagine it, better than she. It means *everything* in America."

I get tired sometimes, trying to remember to read things without judgment and put them in the context of their original time. I realize this is a stupid thing for a historian to say, but, nonetheless, I feel it. Especially when these authors from the lists of the "Great Works" contain so many voices that belittle people like me, or claim enlightenment for themselves when they condescend to imagine what life for "Others" might be like, and then congratulate themselves for the attempt, as if the attempt is automatic success itself.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Rather the ice than their way." This defiant declaration by Erik the Red when confronted with the choice of exile or converting to Christianity caught my attention immediately when I picked up this book fifteen years ago. I finished the first piece, put the book down, and didn't wind up reading the rest of the book until recently. I'm glad I came back to it. It's a collection of poetic essays on certain figures in American history, a meditation on the concept of "history" itself, and an explication of Williams' theories of "Americaness." (Which can be summed up by this quote: "The dreadful and curious thing is that men, despoiled and having nothing, must long most for that which they have not and so, out of the intensity of their emptiness imagining they are full, deceive themselves and all the despoiled of the world into their sorry beliefs. It is the spirit that existing nowhere in them is forced into their dreams. The Pilgrims, they, the seed, instead of growing, looked black at the world and damning its perfections praised a zero in themselves. The inversion of a Gothic Calvin.") Williams can be difficult to parse at times, and I admit to getting lost now and then while reading this book, but if you slow down, take a deep breath, and concentrate, you can work through most of the thickets. He uses many original texts (the journals of Columbus and Cortez, transcripts of the Salem witch trials) but reframes them in order to view them from new angles. Some standouts were the Eric the Red chapter and those on Daniel Boone, Aaron Burr, Cortez, and DeSoto. The book reminded me some of William Vollmann's Seven Dreams series (I'm a huge fan of his), and I wouldn't be surprised if he took some inspiration from it.

[Vel Veeter]

A truly strange book I kept seeing quoted in a recent literary criticism book I read. This book looks at the history of US letters from Leif Ericksen through the Civil War and attempts to write a kind of impressionistic history of that field. One of the weird things about American literature is how dominant fiction, poetry, and drama are in our thinking about it now, but basicall before Cooper and Irving, there was very little fiction happening, or rather, much of the fiction we did have has not been held onto as we moved forward. From Hawthorne through maybe 1990 or so, fiction has been the truly dominant force in American literature/letters. I think right now, we're in a period of young adult literature and especially memoir, but that more a product of the industry of publishing as much as anything else.

So this book's focus on unshaped personal writing like diaries and letters makes a lot of sense given where it begins and where it ends. Sometimes it feels like literary criticism, sometimes poetry, and other times like Williams is attempting to embody the literature he's reading and trying to make sense of the American character through emulation. This is most apparent in one of the longer sections where he recreates dozens of entries of Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World attempts to capture the voice. For a small 200 page book, it's a book that seems to really prefigure several important postmodern American writers like Pynchon, Barth, and Vollmann as well.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably missed the point of a lot of this, which Williams assures me is part of what it means to be an american, but other passages stopped me cold, ~90 years after its first publication and in the midst of the current political cluster****: "A most confusing thing in American history, as we read it, is the nearly universal lack of scale," and, "morals affect the food, and the food the bone..."
There is a lot here that struck me as sort of a preface for later American writing, arguing (or pleading?) for an organic place-based consciousness, rather than denying our own location and history. Pretty cool, if kind of tedious at times. I skipped the parts about battles between ships during the war for independence.

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't like it. I can appreciate what he's trying to accomplish, but I just didn't enjoy it and I think he praised Edgar Allan Poe far too much.

[Juliet · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, got conquistador sweat and blood on the tongue.

[Michele Ferrari · Rating 4 out of 5]

"il destino primitivo di questa terra è oscuro, ma è stato ulteriormente oscurato da un terreno di cultura ad esso estranea appiccicatogli sopra, e che ha reso quel destino più che mai difficile da stabilire"

Williams racconta la storia del nuovo mondo da Eric il rosso ad Abramo Lincoln, ovvero la storia di chi l'America l'ha conquistata e colonizzata. nelle vene dell'America c'è principalmente il sangue versato. sangue dei nativi americani, degli aztechi e dei maya. Il sangue degli inglesi e dei francesi, degli spagnoli e di tutti coloro che hanno provato a creare qualcosa dove la natura vergine la faceva da padrone.

il libro segue l'evoluzione del continente attraverso la vita di una moltitudine di personaggi storici di cui converrebbe avere un'infarinatura prima di iniziare a leggere (per fortuna le note danno una mano a inquadrare periodo storico e eventi chiave). lo stile è molto interessante perché si muove attraverso vari generi e punti di vista: saggio, romanzo, diario, lettera, dialogo, resoconto formale a seconda del personaggio e delle fonti usate per rappresentarlo.

In generale la tesi di Williams pare essere quella di vedere nella colonizzazione del continente americano una vendetta del mondo verso qualcosa che per millenni si era definito come "altro" da esso, un'eccezione della storia immobile e immutabile. L'America è come una bellissima orchidea che deve essere recisa per il crimine della sua naturale perfezione. Le fondamenta della nuova America sono terrificanti in quanto basate su una cultura europea trasportata in un ambiente naturale e inadatto. I padri pellegrini puritani non sono eroi ma fuggiaschi la cui doppia morale condanna gli indiani mentre perdona loro stessi.

Insomma l'intera storia del continente americano (perché prima dell'arrivo degli europei e della civiltà di storia non si può parlare) è una storia di violenza ,morte, sopraffazione. Non è un caso che Eric Il Rosso giunga sulle coste americane scappando dopo aver ucciso qualcuno. Sono le sue mani macchiate di sangue a toccare la terra vergine del nuovo continente.

Sia chiaro questa non è un'opera anti coloniale ma presenta comunque un taglio fortemente critico della storia americana. Per essere un libro del 1925 mantiene un aspetto di contemporaneità interessante e non posso non chiedermi cosa avrebbe aggiunto Williams se avesse potuto scriverlo oggi.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dr. Williams has some ideas about the inherited psychological character of the American people: as you might guess, the Puritans have ruined us all. Anyway, this is an interesting look at American history by a poet with a distinctly heterodox view, and who plays around with some well-known, and some other lesser known characters in building his version of the myth.
Also, you can pick up good bits of so to speak official history: for instance,

The thirty-sixth article of the Constitution of Pennsylvania runs expressly in these words: "As every freeman, to preserve his independence (if he has not a sufficient estate) ought to have some profession, calling, trade or farm, whereby he may honestly subsist, there can be no necessity for, nor use in, establishing offices of profit, the usual effects of which are dependence and servility unbecoming freemen, in the possessors and expectants; faction, contention, corruption, and disorder among the people; Wherefore, whenever an office, through increase of fees or otherwise, becomes so profitable as to occasion many to apply for it, the profits ought to be lessened by the Legislature."

This appears to be true. Look it up! We were once wiser than we are now.

[Cobertizo · Rating 4 out of 5]

"La mezquindad de nuestra historia, nuestra estupidez, nuestra pereza de espíritu, la falsedad de nuestras notas históricas, la completa pérdida de los objetivos. Abocada al disparate, la tenacidad con la que el temor inspira leyes y costumbres -la supresión de la magnífica danza del maíz de los Chippewas, símbolo del proceso generativo- como si la moral sólo pudiera tener un carácter... hasta, en la confusión, nada resta del gran Nuevo Mundo Americano sino el recuerdo del indio"

[Isaac Lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over my head most of the time- and unfamiliar with much of the history here, but the writing is melodic, and beautiful, like a pleasant stream or river. I haven't read Williams before and I know very little about him (besides my impressions from the film Paterson), and this is probably a weird way to start off, but a read worth revisting. I'll remember a few unique perspectives that Williams offers- whether it be Washington, the Salem witch trials or even earlier history.

[Stacks of Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

If in 4 pages, I can ever write something as original and beautiful as "Sir Walter Raleigh", well then I'll be damned. This story and some of his others are such an inspiration.

"Sing! O Muse and say, he was too mad in love, too clear, too desperate for her to trust upon great councils. He was not England, she was. She held him, but she was too shrewd a woman not to know she held him as.a woman, she, the Queen; which left an element."

WHAT IS THE ELEMENT???

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It seems silly to assign stars to these sorts of books—these Important Monuments of Culture—as though my or anyone's assessment that "it was amazing" has any meaning.

At any rate, I found the book difficult, opaque, unsettling, and disturbing on several levels. And utterly unlike anything else I have ever read. I will be pondering it for a long time.

[user061219 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Personal opinion obviously but this is the kind of “poetry” and “poetic prose” that turns me off from poetry completely. Overly extravagant language without focus that has me lost and sleepy after the third paragraph.

[Graham Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Review from 2023)

Read for school all the way back in college. It was for an American politics class so it made sense to include but ultimately the book didn't leave too much of an impression on a young college freshmen.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

A poet's history of the united states: spectacular prose with moments of shining insight, but not enough to commend.

[Nathan Douthit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the best I've read by WCW but still worthwhile.

[Darkwood]

Deep insights into our early cultural formation that are still gravely relevant.

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Especially enjoyed the ever relevant essay The Voyage of the Mayflower.”.