earticle

영어

In the 1930s the United States was beginning to slide into the worst depression in its history. During the period, many U.S. citizens had lost faith in their business leaders and politicians. Some had begun to question the American economic system and even democracy itself. The Depression compelled artists and intellectuals to choose sides in political battles between Capitalists and Communists and clarify the politics in relation to their own work. Williams avoided making political commitments to the Communist Party, though he fully understood the ill consequences of the capitalist system. His Depression poetry and prose demonstrate drastic changes in his career as a poet including his increased recognition of class conflict and his professed devotion to a realistic portrayal of the lower-class people marginalized in the American society. He renounced the bourgeois and high modernist rhetoric that dominated so much of the literary scene of the day. His most poignant writing of the period turned to those people and things less discussed in American literature. Poor old people, garbage, junk yards, immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, and proletarian women—all of these become in Williams's poetry metonymical expressions for “the low”, an actual America that had been underrepresented in previous poetries.