Ivory Towers and War Machines: William Carlos Williams and the Humanities under Fire (Article)
Title: Ivory Towers and War Machines: William Carlos Williams and the Humanities under Fire
Author: Tony Barnstone
Abstract: In lieu of an abstract: an early paragraph in the article: William Carlos Williams saw the world-wide convulsion of the Second World War as an opportunity to break up old oppressive orders and create a new order, but—despite his political rhetoric—by this he didn’t mean replacing fascism with democracy, but rather a replacing of traditional metrics with avant-garde forms of ordering the poem. Williams’s loyalty to the cause of the avant-garde was extreme enough that he showed little sympathy for those academics he saw covertly “digging,” even if it meant that they were to be gassed out of their trenches in the universities by a wartime shift of values toward practical education. For Williams, the poem must be reinvented as both practical and impractical, both machine and flower, in order to save us from a dehumanized machine consciousness that he associates with both the Germans and the Academy.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/554230/pdf
Primary URL Description: WCW Review Direct Link to Article
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Publisher: William Carlos Williams Review

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