Williams’ Quest for the American Identity against Anglophilia and Paternity

Williams’ Quest for the American Identity against Anglophilia and Paternity

This paper examines William Carlos Williams’ anti-patrilineal poetics against his father and Ezra Pound’s Anglophilia. Williams regrets the absence of an intimate relationship with his English father. Through the figure of his father, Williams clearly recognizes the negative qualities of patriarchal ideologies. Above all, the poet discloses that his father’s negative qualities such as indifference, silence, detachment, fierceness and emotional brutalization lead to the development of his resentment for the patrilineal British literary tradition. Ezra Pound also makes Williams have a deep antipathy to the British literary tradition because he strongly asks Williams to follow patrilineal British literary tradition mirroring the patriarchal myths of male dominance and European supremacy. Williams believes Pound’s “mind fertilizing mind” to seek a spiritual father motivates Pound’s expatriation. Thus, he specifically regards William George, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot as the men who eventually bring literary sterility by following the patrilineal British literary tradition. Against “father to father” tradition, Williams turns to the matrilineal tradition that Pound views as a non-British literary tradition. Williams’ awareness of the “literary sterility,” which the British literary tradition brings, points the way toward the authentic American identity. Turning to the matrilineal tradition, Williams can create the new poetics in “here and now” of America against “then and there” of Europe.