ThesisProfessorLeroySearle962212thAveNESeattle,WA.98115.docVIP

Sam Hushagen Thesis/ Professor Leroy Searle 9622 12th Ave NE Seattle, WA. 98115 Samhus85@ The Copulative Imagination: William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All “A single new thought, imagination, abstract principle, even literary style, fit for the time . . . and projected among mankind may duly cause changes, growths, removals, greater than the longest and bloodiest war, or the most stupendous, merely political, dynastic or commercial overturn.” Walt Whitman “The imagination is the transmuter. It is the changer. Without imagination life cannot go on for we are left staring at the empty casings where truth lived yesterday while the creature has escaped behind us. It is the power of mutation which the mind possesses to rediscover the truth.” William Carlos Williams By way of prefacing my attempt to understand Williams’ theory of imagination let us begin with the last poem in Spring and All. The poem, like the book on whole, is engaging the poetic tradition of the reverdie, or ode to spring. It opens simply enough, “Black eyed susan/ rich orange/ round the purple core,” with an image of a common American wild-flower (151) . The reverdie, which means literally “re-greening,” has a very long history in English verse, from Chaucer’s Prologue to Eliot’s “April is the cruelest month” (Eliot 474). Like Eliot, Williams is bending this tradition to his own poetic ends, though the use Williams will make of this tradition throughout his text differs radically from Eliot’s. Williams plays off well-known literary associations of the daisy as a token of virginal innocence and fidelity, writing “the white daisy/ is not/ enough” (Shakespeare 678; Chaucer 498; I 151). By opening the poem with an image of an aster and rejecting the conventional white daisy, Williams is calling for something more than traditional associations and imagery in poetry, something new and distinctly American. Williams is dismissing a slavish dedication to traditional symbols and allusions as inadequate, call