The studied language countries literature

1.2. William Carlos Williams: Staying in America
In the stay-put-or-leave controversy between expatriate American artists and their counterparts who chose to stay home, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were opposing spokesmen. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1883 to an English father and a Spanish and French speaking mother from Puerto Rico. He attended schools in Geneva and Paris. In college where he studied medicine, he met and became friends with Ezra Pound who had a great influence on Williams becoming a poet, besides working his whole life as a doctor. In contrast to the exile writers, Williams never wished to leave America or to live and work abroad; he was the ‘American poet at home’. In one of the various letters, which Pound and Williams exchanged over their lifelong friendship, Pound argued that it was Williams’ foreign blood, which enabled him to stay in America by inoculating him against the native virus that compelled Pound and Eliot to leave.
There is a blood poison in America; you can idealize the place (easier now that Europe is so damd shaky) all you like, but you haven’t a drop of the cursed blood in you, and you don’t need to fight the disease day and night; you never have had to. Eliot has it perhaps worse than I have - poor devil. You have the advantage of arriving in the milieu with a fresh flood of Europe in your veins, Spanish, French, English, Danish. You had not the thin milk of New York and New England from the pap; and you can therefore keep the environment outside you, and decently objective.
There is the paradox based on their own admission that Williams’ mixed blood impelled him to cling to America, while Pound and Eliot’s WASP ancestry compelled them to leave. Williams’ position was that of a second generation American immigrant: he was a foreigner longing to belong. He perceived America as something new and special. One reason Pound and Eliot felt they did not belong was that the flood of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the United States was superseding their race and class. Both were especially elitist about their origins. However, they show much difference in their character, as Robert Langbaum noticed: “[…] No two friends can have been more opposite in personality than Pound and Eliot. Pound was the more ‘American’ of the two – the more democratic, individualistic, spontaneous, sincere, a radical at heart. […] Eliot was at heart conservative, armored with Boston and English reserve.”[6] Nevertheless, they shared a desire to go international, unlike Williams, who insisted that the local, what he perceived at home in the present time, was the universal. In the following quote Williams comments on the geographical and, moreover, intellectual split between him and Pound:

I wish only to say that for years we have been of opposite but friendly camps, touching the origin of poetic genius. We parted years ago, he to move his intellectual equals in Europe, I remained at home and struggle to discover here the impetus to my achievements, if I found myself able to write anything at all… He left the states under the assumption that it was mind that fertilizes mind, that the mere environment is just putty and that – assuming one’s self great […] the thing to do in this world is, or was then, to go to Europe, which he did.

Although both writers viewed the world from different angles, they conform on several poetic features. In correspondence to Pound’s claim for a poetry presenting things, Williams wrote in Paterson:“No ideas but in things.” Following his colleague Pound, Williams was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement. However, his subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances and lives of common people. That is one reason why Williams preferred to write in the language of the people and not in contrast to Pound and Eliot, extensively using foreign languages. Whereas Williams represents a more down to earth type of poet, Pound and Eliot had an elitist attitude. Space forbids a complete treatise on the relation between the three important figures of the twentieth century poetry. The purpose of this chapter was to point out that there existed a countermovement in America that focused on the presentation of the local, of which Williams was the main representative.