“While the imagination strains / after deer”: William Carlos Williams’ Interrogations of the American Transcendental Imagination and the Proto-Suburban Scene

Abstract

Oftentimes the American suburbs are considered through the lens of architecture, economics, fiction, and visual media. And, typically, the conversation centers on their cultural zenith in the 1950s. However, one literary form is neglected in this conversation: poetry. This omission is peculiar, as a fascination with the vastness of the continent’s landscape—and its significance—pervades the history of American verse. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the apparently endless expanses of space and rejuvenative qualities of the land provide the poet’s ideal inspiration. Furthermore, Walt Whitman, in his original edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), is very much concerned with rendering the American experience through the landscape. As America approached modernity, suburbanization subsumed this romanticized attitude toward the landscape and the evacuated rural spaces outside of urban cores to produce a new space for the bourgeoisie middle class—a phenomenon that both Kenneth T. Jackson and Robert Fishman chronicle in their seminal historical texts on American suburbanization. The relocation of the wealthy to the periphery of society created a new hybridized space for Modernist poets, such as William Carlos Williams, to consider. Thus, early Modernist pastoral poetry became concerned with a manufactured “organic” space, a world that emerged from a confluence of nature and society. By employing and integrating Williams’ poetry, the history of the pastoral form, the history of the American suburbs, and contemporary literary criticism, my paper will consider how Williams’ poetry reacted to the subsumption of the American countryside