『봄과 모든 것』 에 나타난 역설의 시학

The Poetics of Paradox in William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All

This paper examines the creative undecidability generated by the poetics of paradox implied in William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All, an experimental work composed of poetry and prose. Williams emphasizes “contact” with local experience as the basis of good writing. But he also attempts to attain artistic autonomy separated from reality through imagination. In Spring and All, he tries to unite these paradoxical demands into a “design,” a second reality to rival the real world. But Williams’ design is not consistently achieved in his poetic practice. Some poems, such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “The Rose,” show his success in artistic composition by imagination. Especially, “The Rose” is full of the creative dynamics produced by the Cubist collage technique, crossing the “edge” between the real and the artificial. On the other hand, other poems in the same work reveal his dilemma in overcoming the pressure of social convention and taming the irritable elements into an artistic new order. This characteristic is mainly prominent in the poems which deal with the contemporary American culture. In these poems, the individual elements do not cohere into a poetic composition and the poet fails to articulate a new American cultural identity. But Williams paradoxically succeeds in saving the plurality of America by resisting against the force of cultural assimilation and homogenization. Spring and All is a heterogeneous text filled with creative tension caused by diverse contradictory elements which anticipates the form of Paterson.