윌리엄즈와 시의 현실성

William Carlos Williams and the Reality of Poetry

Williams regards Precisionist paintings as being in line with his poetics of reality, yet he adopts a markedly different stance from Precisionism. For him, the essence of an object is the particularity it assumes, a transient and situational fact, not a permanent and universal quality. Besides, he repudiates depiction, viewing it as copying that produces an illusion of reality. This means that, while he accepts insights from paintings, he interprets them in ways that align with his own ideas, at the core of which lies imagination. For him, imagination enables the experience of a fact, and serves as the compositional principle for its expression. ‘Sympathy’ allows direct contact unmediated by conceptual knowledge with an object, while ‘design’ expresses the experience without damage from logic and embodies the order of nature. Through these functions of imagination, poetry achieves an exact correspondence with the object’s fact, and thereby becomes itself a reality.