In Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass, he calls our attention to the poet’s role in America. He says at one point “Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him, he masters it.” For Whitman, the poet’s work pulls society forward, drawing out the truths of contemporary America while avoiding stagnation in poetic conventions. One obvious pupil to this philosophy is William Carlos Williams, who, in his collection Spring and All, meditates upon the language of “today.” In the moment, accumulated from every previous day to its existence, “today” is the spring of existence, as our imaginations quarrel to make sense of the past without ever looking around at the present world.
Williams joins Whitman here in resisting the stagnation caused by the “imagination,” which could be said is no more than a sort of dwelling on the pre-experienced. In Whitman’s Preface, we see the poet standing as a secure agent in the spectrum of time; time seems to revolve around the poet who “holds his steady faith” and “is judgment.” In an ironic homage to Whitman’s own philosophy, Williams adopts some conventions of Whitman’s hybridized prose-poetry while reinventing Whitman’s view on time. For Williams, it is instead the poet who is subject to the pull of time, as he says in the section THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAIGIARISM, “It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING.”
I think this kind of call and response is reflective of the descent-with-modification relationship Whitman maintains with his poetic offspring, both in convention and content. To mimic Whitman in form and philosophy is to pay no mind to both his intentions and premonitions for the poetic world; Williams certainly adopts of the spirit Whitman inhabits throughout American literature by implementing unconventional form (from nonsensical title to stylistic shifts) and placing the writer back on top of his head where Whitman would keep him on solid ground, in control.
Yes, both are certainly propulsive poets, but the stakes are so different. Williams’s language is self-consciously violent and destructive; the past must be annihilated to make way for the future, the “spring” of existence. And the address is also diminished, addressed primarily to the “imagination,” which can seem a sort of hermetic retreat from Whitman’s bold claims to and upon his audience. Very interesting to try and think through this relation–one that could easily sustain a substantial research project.