Cohen on Williams, A Summary

In his article, “Stumbling into Crossfire: William Carlos Williams, Partisan Review, and the Left in the 1930s” Cohen examines Williams’ apparently awkward interactions with the political left. In the preface of the article, Cohen states that “William Carlos Williams had an almost uncanny knack for getting between warring factions and alienating power centers of the Left, particularly Partisan Review.” He goes on to cite three examples (two of which ended in humiliation for Williams) and explain some of the potential reasoning behind Williams’ actions.

In the second section of the article, Cohen explains exactly how Williams could be both a leftist, but at ends with the leftist movement at the same time. Williams was indeed a leftist, and his poems reflect this, but he was not a communist. He didn’t believe in communism nor did he believe that a communist revolution could take place in America. Also, it wasn’t until 1934 that Williams even believed that poetry could be political. Prior to this, he refused to write political poetry. Cohen quotes Williams as writing “[P]oetry is related to poetry, not to social statutes” in selected letters to Kay Boyle. It’s beginning to become abundantly clear how Williams can both agree and be at ends with the leftist movement in the early 1930s.

Cohen continues his article by explaining how as time passes, Williams does indeed become increasingly political with his poetry. He begins to write more about the working man, about servants, and about other hot-button issues among leftist circles. Then in 1936 Williams become at ends with popular leftism once again, by answering a questionnaire with an answer that rejects communism in America. He even writes “It is this same democracy of feeling which will defeat Marxism in America and all other attempts at regimentation of thought and action.” (QTD in Cohen 147) in some other letters. The printing of his disapproval of communism caused him much embarrassment.

By use of these examples, and a few others (most notably another showdown with the same group that published his anticommunism bit, Partisan Review), Cohen claims that the political battlefield leaves Williams “simply out of his depth in dealing with the labyrinthine politics of the Left.” (Cohen 153) but that argument isn’t entirely convincing. While Cohen does provide ample evidence to this claim, he neglects the possibility that Cohen was simply on the foreground attempting to mold the left to a communist free chain of thought, and thus offers no evidence of counter possibilities.