ABSTRACT
In 1934, the year before Ideas of Order was published, William Carlos Williams asked Stevens to write an introduction to a collection of his earlier poetry, the Collected Poems 1921-1931, published by the Objectivist Press in the same year. Stevens agreed somewhat reluctantly, writing an essay in which he called Williams a “romantic poet,” something that he suspected “would horrify him.” Although “the proof” of this romanticism, Stevens argued, was “everywhere,” he added that Williams was only “rarely” romantic in the “accepted sense” (what people speak of as romantic) but first and foremost in his search for what Stevens called the “anti-poetic” (OP 213-15). Thus, although “all poets are to some extent romantic poets,” Williams’ romantic temperament was primarily visible in the fact that he had “spent his life in rejecting the accepted sense of things,” among other things the traditional senses of the romantic.
