Making Contact: William Carlos Williams’ American Literary Aesthetic
Making Contact: William Carlos Williams’ American Literary Aesthetic

Summary/Abstract: With the publication of Contact magazine in 1920–1921, American poet William Carlos Williams promoted a distinctive avant-garde literary aesthetic that was centered on “contact”—a concrete connection between literature and the vocabulary, cadence and feel of the everyday language of people. Though initially well received by expatriate authors representing the American avant-garde, Williams’ contact aesthetic was soon eclipsed by T. S. Eliot’s poetry, his magazine Criterion, and its New Criticism methods that celebrated classical allusions and advocated a detachment of texts from their subjects. This aesthetic shift within the modernist literary aesthetic frustrated Williams, who, with the onset of the Great Depression, was convinced that his contact-based aesthetic was an essential response to the times. The result was the revival of Contact magazine in 1932. Though the publication did not last long (only three editions), it did allow Williams to re-establish a distinctive contact-based “other” aesthetic for American poetry that profoundly influenced later American poets and writers.

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