William Carlos Williams' provocative definition of a poem as 'a machine made of words' is based upon the aesthetics of machines that was prevailing in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s. The machine aesthetics dominated almost all modern styles and movement in visual art such as Russian constructivism, Ducth de Stijl, German Bauhaus, Italian futurism, French cubism, and American precisionism and straight photography. Williams' concept of poem as a machine is, however, evasive enough for some critics like henry Sayre, Peter Schmidt, and Bram Dijkstra to misunderstand it. Sayre claims that the major feature of the visual art of the machine aesthetics is objectivity with no personal feelings or interpretations. He then ascribes objectivity to Williams' poem as a machine in that he is closely connected to precisionism and the poetic movement of objectivism at the same time. Sayre's point is that Williams finally rejects his idea of machine-poem because his real aim is to find an inclusive poetic form that can accommodate both objectivity and subjectivity rather that a form to fit his objective vision alone. Williams associates a machine with a natural living thing in that they both involve movement. What is essential to his idea of machine-poem is then its mechanical structure that creates movement among the parts, which he calls "intrinsic" and "undulant" movement. Intrinsic movement refers to the peculiarity of the poetic movement to its speech, and undulant movement indicates the quality of the movement. Undulant movement arises from 'variable foot,' which with its flexibility enables the poem's movement to be undulant. This is why he takes it as the measure for the loose rhythm of American speech. The idea of variable foot is prefigured in his earlier writing; it is not a special device for later Williams but the general unit of what is known as free verse. This means that there is a consistent underlying quest for a poetic form in accordance with the dynamic structure comparable to the structure of a machine throughout his career despite all the different modes of his poetry. As his general poetic form, Williams's poem as a machine is a living thing whose parts are organized to produce dynamic movement.
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