ABSTRACT

This chapter traces how William Carlos Williams's poetics and his characteristic use of images are indebted to practices found in William Wordsworth, and how Williams claims by later American poets such as Philip Levine and Lorine Niedecker, writers whose poetry and poetics are usually seen as opposed to one another. The heritage Altieri describes how poems and poets are often imposed upon or, as the author argues, re-animated by later writers, as does the way Williams has been variously reread by different contemporary reading communities, even as the self-descriptions of a wide range of poetic practices in the United States (US) look surprisingly familiar to anyone who works on the Romantics. The way in which Williams's own work can plausibly be reread as both Romantic and anti-Romantic is not only an emblem of the flexibility of poetic genealogies; recrafting and reconceiving earlier poetic gestures in a way that renews but also changes them is itself part of Romanticism's continuing presence.