[As spring gets
ready to spring, this week’s series has focused on the season in American culture.
This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses and spring connections of
fellow AmericanStudiers. Add your bloomin’ thoughts, please!]
Following up Monday’s
post on Williams and Eliot, Wade
Linebaugh writes, "I've been fascinated by the contrast between these
two poems for a while and I LOVE reading them together. For me--and especially
because The Waste Land hits first and
makes such a significant splash--I often read the two as warring over language
and culture itself and especially the American idiom. For Eliot, so much of him
doing the writer's work of 'shoring the fragments against his ruins' always
reads to me as a heroic stance he considers himself uniquely set for. His deep
and allusive writing is a way of mobilizing the history of language and writing
as a way to /craft/ something to stand in opposition to bankrupt or entropic
modern culture. I read Williams, by contrast, as willing to see something that
opposes entropy springing up. For the browns and lifelessness in "Spring
and All" there's also the wildcarrot leaf and that fantastic awakening of
the roots in the final line. And knowing Williams's imagery and taste for 'the
american grain,' I always see a kind of faith in his version of Spring.
Anyway, that's just me. I always see a conflict about the culture they see around them, partly because Eliot is so situated in Europe and matches that with such densely allusive verse, and Williams is so powerfully American and relies on a set of poetic imagery to match. Neither sees anything entirely bankrupt, I agree, but Eliot sees a world he has to fight to make meaning in. Williams sees the perennial return of organic life, which always just manages to do its thing on its own...even when it's March and the snow feels endless and you can't even imagine how the trees around going to manage to push out buds. At any rate I feel myself pulled powerfully by both of them at different times."
Anyway, that's just me. I always see a conflict about the culture they see around them, partly because Eliot is so situated in Europe and matches that with such densely allusive verse, and Williams is so powerfully American and relies on a set of poetic imagery to match. Neither sees anything entirely bankrupt, I agree, but Eliot sees a world he has to fight to make meaning in. Williams sees the perennial return of organic life, which always just manages to do its thing on its own...even when it's March and the snow feels endless and you can't even imagine how the trees around going to manage to push out buds. At any rate I feel myself pulled powerfully by both of them at different times."
Andrew McGregor Tweets, “It’s not
Spring without a reading of Casey at the Bat!”
Melanie Newport Tweets, “I keep
coming back to this
very enjoyable cartoon.”
Olivia Lucier
writes, “When I was a kid my mom read me Miss
Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. I
always liked the illustrations. Very spring like! Although not a classic novel.
Still a spring story!”
Floyd Cheung
shares “Toshio Mori’s story ‘Lil’ Yokohama.”
Rob LeBlanc
writes, “I would share the unabashed mid-1960s pop-rock enthusiasm of Gary Lewis and the Playboys'
‘Green Grass.’”
Natalie Chase
notes, “With Easter right around the corner I can't help but think of the very
opening chapter of Love
Medicine...‘The
World's Greatest Fisherman!’”
And finally, Nancy
Caronia shares that “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is my
choice for cultural critic of 2017. Here's a
new piece he wrote on Get Out.” Jeff
Renye adds, “Kareem is a member of the
Baker Street Irregulars. Interesting fella.”
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other spring connections or contexts you’d share?
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