Analysis of No Ideas but in Things
Analysis of "No Ideas but in Things"
I am going to show the implications of Williams’ maxim by demonstrating the effects it has on his poetry, and most notably himself. First of all I would like to divert our attention to duality as a major theme, and affecting factor of such a maxim. For my introductory explanation I would like to consider the criticism of J. Hillis Miller.
In his famous essay on William Carlos Williams in Poets of Reality (1966), J. Hillis Miller contends that the world of Williams is beyond dualism. According to Miller’s pre-deconstructive argument, "A primordial union of subject and object is the basic presupposition" of Williams’s poetry ("Introduction" 6). Citing Williams’s dictum, "No ideas but in things," and such poems as "The Red Wheelbarrow," Miller claims that–in contrast to the duality inherent in the idealism of the classical, romantic, or symbolist traditions, wherein the objects of the world signify transcendent "supernatural realities"–the objects of Williams’s poetry signify themselves and nothing more, existing "within a shallow space, like that created on the canvases of the American abstract expressionists" ("Introduction" 3), exposing the poem not as a representation of an object, but as an object in itself. Miller finds in Williams’s verse "no symbolism, no depth, no reference to a world beyond the world, no pattern of imagery, no dialectical structure, no interaction of subject and object–just description" ("Introduction" 5). For Miller, this triumph over duality represents nothing less than "a revolution in human sensibility" and an "abandonment" of the ego: "There is no description of private inner experience. There is also no description of objects that are external to the poet’s mind. Nothing is external to his mind. His mind overlaps with things; things overlap with his mind" (Poets 288 & "Introduction" 7). Accordingly, Miller echoes Williams’s claim that a good poet "doesn’t select his material. What is there to select? It is”. (Poets 306)
Clearly Williams was no symbolist; his poetry does consistently foreground the surface value of ‘things.’ And critics of Williams’s poetry owe a good deal to Miller’s essay, which, among other things, considerably solidified Williams’s position in the canon of twentieth-century American literature. As Paul Mariani notes, "However we view his approach and strategy, J. Hillis Miller’s is one of the most important and seminal encounters in the sixty-year history of Williams criticism. Miller can be argued with and perhaps...