William Carlos Williams and McCarthyism

Politics

Modern liberals portray Williams as aligned with liberal democratic issues; however, as his publications in more politically radical journals like New Masses suggest, his political commitments were further to the left than the term "liberal" indicates. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism, and in 1935 published "The Yachts", a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution. The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race". Furthermore, in the introduction to his 1944 book of poems "The Wedge", he writes of socialism as an inevitable future development and as a necessity for true art to develop. In 1949, he published a booklet/bar "The Pink Church" that was about the human body but was understood, in the context of McCarthyism, as being dangerously pro-communist. The anti-communist movement led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, an event that contributed to his being treated for clinical depression. In an unpublished article for Blast, Williams wrote artists should resist producing propaganda and be "devoted to writing (first and last)." However, in the same article Williams claims that art can also be "in the service of the proletariat".

ref: http://www.poemhunter.com/william-carlos-williams/biography/

* Although his health gradually deteriorated, Williams’ indomitable spirit enabled him to continue writing, completing his long poem, "Paterson," and Pulitzer Prize-winning Pictures from Brueghel. Williams also was appointed as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, delayed first by his health, then held up and finally withdrawn because of political accusations of leftist sympathies and acquaintance with Ezra Pound. An enormous disappointment to Williams, this politically charged event during the McCarthy era contributed to a deep depression, necessitating 8 months of "living hell" in a mental hospital. After the big stroke in 1952, as physician-poet Merrill Moore also observed, "it was remarkable that preservation of the creativity center of Williams’ brain allowed him to produce an astonishing volume of writing in the mid 1950s"

ref: http://ats.ctsnetjournals.org/cgi/content/full/67/5/1512

*MRS. WILLIAMS

That was in 1952, when Bill was going down to take the chair of poetry. Senator McCarthy was in the news then, and they were frightened to death in Washington. There was a woman who was lobbying for a reform in poetry, who had no use for free verse. She had a little periodical, I've forgotten the name of it, and she wrote a letter saying what an outrage it was that a man like that—  

INTERVIEWER

Of course, this was all in the aftermath of the Bollingen award to Pound.  

MRS. WILLIAMS

Bill had nothing to do with that. But if he had been a member of the Fellows then, he would certainly have voted for him.  

INTERVIEWER

Was Dr. Williams ever asked to testify against Pound?  

MRS. WILLIAMS

They questioned him two or three times. They wanted him to listen to some records and swear it was Pound. Bill couldn't do that, but he said he would tell them frankly what he knew. And that was all. Every time we went down to Washington, Bill went to see him.

ref: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4486/the-art-of-poetry-no-6-william-carlos-williams