Answer to Question #267385 in History for Kelsey Jand

Question

Read, highlight, and comment on the following excerpt:

Let me not be misunderstood.  Strength doesn’t come from physical capacity.  It comes from indomitable will.  A definite forgiveness would therefore mean a definite recognition of our strength... We feel too downtrodden not to be any and revengeful.  But I must not refrain from saying that India can gain more by waiving the right of punishment.  We have better work to do, a better mission to deliver to the world.

Answer 1

The conflict Williams felt between his parents' hopes for their son's success in medicine and his own less conventional impulses is mirrored in his poetic heroes of the time—John Keats and Walt Whitman. Keats's traditionally rhymed and metered verse impressed the young poet tremendously. "Keats was my God," Williams later revealed; and his first major poetic work was a model of Keats's "Endymion." In contrast, Whitman's free verse offered "an impulse toward freedom and release of the self," said Donald Barlow Stauffer. Williams explained how he came to associate Whitman with this impulse toward freedom when he said, "I reserved my 'Whitmanesque' thoughts, a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my head and heart from turgid obsessions." Yet, by his first year at Pennsylvania Williams had found a considerably more vivid mentor than Whitman in a friend, Ezra Pound.

Williams's friendship with Pound marked a watershed in the young poet's life: he later insisted, "before meeting Pound is like B.C. and A.D." "Under Pound's influence and other stimuli," reported John Malcolm Brinnin, "Williams was soon ready to close the door on the 'studied elegance of Keats on one hand and the raw vigor of Whitman on the other.'" Aside from the poetic influences, Pound introduced Williams to a group of friends, including poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and painter Charles Demuth, "who shared the kinds of feelings that in Rutherford had made him frightened and isolated," Breslin declared. H.D., for example, with her arty dress and her peculiarities—sometimes she'd splash ink onto her clothes "to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference towards the mere means of writing"—fascinated Williams with a "provocative indifference to rule and order which I liked."

In a similar way, it was a reaction against the rigid and ordered poetry of the time that led Williams to join Pound, H.D., and others as the core of what became known as the Imagist movement. While correlative revolutionary movements had begun in painting (Cezanne), music (Stravinsky), and fiction (Stein), poetry was still bogged down by "the inversions and redundancies imposed by the effort 'to fill out a standard form,'" explained David Perkins. The Imagists broke from this formulaic poetry by stressing a verse of "swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing." Williams's first book, Poems (1909), a "conventional" work, "correct in sentiment and diction," preceded the Imagist influence. But in The Tempers (1913), as Bernard Duffey realized, Williams's "style was directed by an Imagist feeling, though it still depended on romantic and poeticized allusiveness." And while Pound drifted towards increased allusiveness in his work, Williams stuck with Pound's tenet to "make it new." By 1917 and the publication of his third book, Al Que Quiere!, "Williams began to apply the Imagist principle of 'direct treatment of the thing' fairly rigorously," declared James Guimond. Also at this time, as Perkins demonstrated, Williams was "beginning to stress that poetry must find its 'primary impetus' ... in 'local conditions.'" "I was determined to use the material I knew," Williams later reflected; and as a doctor, Williams knew intimately the people of Rutherford.