Reviews of William Carlos Williams and the Painters

    "A excellent assessment of the importance of painting on the early poetry of Williams is William Carlos Williams and the Painters 1909-1923. In this recent examination, William Marling corrects the relatively narrow focus of Dijkstra's work by looking instead at the whole Alfred Kreymborg/ Walter Arensberg "circle," which included American and European painters- Demuth, Stella, Hartley, Duchamp, and Picabia, among others -- as well as poets, intellectuals, and artists in other media, such as Isadora Duncan."

        -- Christopher Sten, American Studies International, Oct. 1983, Vol. XXI, No. 5
 

    "William Marling's William Carlos Williams the Painters, 1909-1923 is a meatier, more informative approach to the study of Williams' development as a poet. Limiting his concern to the poet's early years, Marling stresses Williams' alliances with graphic artists during a period when he could find little support or solace from other writers. Marling discusses Williams' friendships, and shared aesthetics, with Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Walter Arensberg, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and others, drawing from previously unpublished materials -- not only of Williams but of the artists. The first half of the study traces the relationships, the second connects Williams' writing of these years with aesthetic movements as germane to art as they were to painting. Marling's readings of Spring and All and Kora in Hell are among the most informative these books have received."

        --Linda Wagoner, 16 Modern American Authors, Duke University Press, 1984.

    "The visual frame of Williams mind receives richer and wiser treatment by Marling, who replaces the question of 'influences' (constituted by what Williams may, or may not, have read) with the question of 'circles' (constituted by friendships, particularly with Charles Sheeler, Duchamp, Demuth, Hartley, and Walter Arensberg, which always had a more enduring role in Williams' imaginative universe) in order to stress that Williams' early poetry has a concern, above all, to operate in visual terms -- what Williams himself called 'pre-writing.' Marling's 'circles' render a more gracious reading than do the 'influences' that are rather tightly listed by….. Marling examines the poetry of the period within the convincing rubric that "there is, in fact, no more obvious source for Williams' shift away from the neo-Keatsian, traditionally-oriented poetry that he wrote before 1914 to the lean, rapid poetry he wrote afterward than the Arensberg Circle."

    "William Marling's book takes a close look at one of the most deliberately modern of American poets and the deliberately modern painters who helped shape his work. His study focuses on scarcely more than a dozen years in which not only Williams but dozens of other poets and painters established the tenets of modernism that have dominated the greater part of the century….. What happened? That is what Professor Marling's book sets forth. And though some of the forces acting on Williams were peculiar to him and his experience, somewhat similar congeries of forces probably were operating on the majority of modern artist who were not so much innovators as quick responders to currents already in motion…. Professor Marling is thorough and perceptive in pointing out the direct and indirect impact of these artists on Williams' own work. Not all had a theory of art, but theory played a vigorous accompaniment to the fashioning of works that proclaimed 'make it new.'

………….

    "The second half of Marling's book gives close attention to Williams' poetry, from Poems (1909) to Spring and All (1923). It is as good a short treatment of Williams' work as we have, though Kora in Hell does not come clearly into view for me despite Marling's excellent discussion. Perhaps that merely proves his opening comment that Kora "won't come clean in a satisfying literary way." Or maybe it proves whatever might be meant by Eric Auerbach, as quoted by Marling, that the "improvisations" in Kora are "fraught with background."

        -- Kenneth Eble, Western Humanities Review, Spring, 1983. 274-76.