William Carlos Williams and the pastoral tradition

grantor: University of TorontoPastoral is a subject that has historically enjoyed a great deal of critical attention, and there is nothing strange in the fact that this interest has continued up to the present day. Most recent attempts at addressing modern pastoral, however, have suffered from two major drawbacks: a failure to ground the definition of pastoral in any kind of a historical or critical tradition, or, more commonly, a perverse choice of works or authors for study. In particular there has been a stunning neglect with regard to one of the twentieth century's most prolific pastoralists: William Carlos Williams. The following thesis seeks to fill this critical gap by approaching the body of Williams's work from the perspective of what are, in effect, various pastoral traditions. In the Introduction I locate the source of Williams's fascination with pastoral in the divided character of his writing career and the symbols (or "facts") of his local environment. In Chapter One I discuss his relation to tradition generally, and observe how this contributes to his basically unironic approach to pastoral writing. Chapter Two looks at the relation between Williams's pastoral and his interest in the visual arts (but avoids going over ground well-covered by critics interested in his connections to the Modernist avant-garde). Chapter Three discusses Williams as a pastoral "regionalist". Chapter Four shows how Williams's famous line "dissonance leads to discovery", can be attributed to the discovery of a natural order underlying reality that Williams associates with pastoral. A brief Conclusion is followed by an Appendix that looks at a single poem, "The Italian Garden", in a way that will provide a summary as well as demonstrate a useful application of some of the material covered.Ph.D