William Carlos Williams and Transcendentalism Fitting the Crab in a Box

William Carlos Williams's work is generally regarded as innovative and daring - he is seen as one of the great modernists. Yet Williams continually addressed the past as the means to shape, assess and even defend his aesthetic. These "backward glances" most often rested on Walt Whitman's achievements. In this book, Ron Callan considers their relationship but does so in the context of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He argues that Emerson's "crisis" was the catalyst for a dramatic evaluation of the nature of creativity. Examining a broad section of Williams's work, Callan demonstrates that the transcendentalist experience was a significant element in the "modernist's" creative process. It offered him the stability and variety of paths taken, and established the foundations for his own experiments. Giving each writer and each genre a separate chapter, Callan develops a narrative of sensibilities which enriches our understanding of the radical nature of transcendentalism and the consistency of Williams's extraordinary aesthetic.