T. S. 엘리엇과 하이모더니즘 미학에 대한 윌리엄 카를로스 윌리엄즈의 견해

William Carlos Williams's Reading of T.S. Eliot and High Modernist Aesthetics

Hong-Ki KimIn her well-known essay for the New Yorker, Cynthia Ozick described her observations on how T.S. Eliot had had no lasting influence on modern poetry. Hilton Kramer from the Eliot camp claimed that Eliot must be embraced as a poet and critic of exceptional importance. This sort of polemic between these two critics makes us continually ponder on whether Ozick's piece was merely an example of biased hyperbole based on ferocious attack or involved something much larger than the vicissitudes of a poet's reputation.It is noteworthy that Eliot was, for many scholars in the field of modernist poetry, the most vocal of his desire to ward off threat of a developing mass culture, to fortify the boundaries between high art and mass culture. Renouncing the matter-of-factness and the ideological aspects of contemporary society for an ideal society of high culture, high-modernist poets such as Eliot and Pound tried to apprehend the chaotic present through the perspective of past literature. Unlike high-modernist poets who were inimical to popular culture, Williams was from the start involved in the avant-garde art that frequently incorporated the fragmented and conflictual nature of contemporary culture. Williams's anti-highmodernist stance is likely to be grasped by comparing a sample passage from “The Wanderer” and “The Great Figure” to the opening lines of Eliot's “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. This comparative study of Eliot and Williams reveals that where Eliot views poetic language as highly figurative, rhetorical, and self-referential, Williams seeks a poetry free from excesses of language, from figuration, containing no word that does not contribute directly to a literal meaning.