The Machine Avant-garde in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

Throughout his entire works, Williams often shows his preoccupation with machine technology. He emphasizes that the poet in the machine age should be an “" engineer" or "artisan," as “" a poem is a machine made of words" to integrate art and technology simultaneously. Significantly, the themes and images on machine technology in his work are always associated with the Avant-garde arts, especially, Precisionism. Through continuous relationship with Precisionist artists such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, Williams' interest in the ideas and achievements of machine aesthetics and indigenous American things are firmly constructed Most importantly, Williams’' machine aesthetics are indivisibly related to speed and movement. The notion of speed and movement in Williams works is so immense that it is almost impossible to analyze Williams’ poetry without understanding it. In fact, almost all of the poems on machine technology clearly reveal the kinetic expressions such as "moving" and "running." It is not surprising that his poetry visually implies the cinematic quality derived from the kinetic imagination. Thus, through wide-ranging experiments with the machine Avant-garde, Williams could create the new poetry which suggests the distinctively American poetics.