William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter: A Tactile Mediation Between the Self and the World
A poetic diary inspired by Surrealism, William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter (1928) highlights the haptic dimension of the act of writing: “I desire, my hands / to have it—instead of the feeling / that there is a piece of glazed paper / between me and the paper—invisible” (Williams 1991, 3...
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| Izdano u: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/polysemes, |
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| Glavni autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jezik: | Anglais |
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Polysèmes
2026
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| Online pristup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sažetak: | A poetic diary inspired by Surrealism, William Carlos Williams’s The Descent of Winter (1928) highlights the haptic dimension of the act of writing: “I desire, my hands / to have it—instead of the feeling / that there is a piece of glazed paper / between me and the paper—invisible” (Williams 1991, 306). This paper argues that The Descent of Winter traces a distinct progression from self-exploration to alterity as Williams establishes a tangible point of contact between the individual and the external world. Intersubjectivity is therefore reestablished thanks to the haptic dimension of The Descent of Winter. Williams moreover uses tactile imagery to bridge the local and the universal, redefining poetic expression as an unmediated, sensory engagement with the world. The sensory immediacy of touch in The Descent of Winter highlights the materiality of experience, foregrounding a tension between the embodied, tactile act of writing and the alienating mediations of language. The linguistic medium indeed distorts direct experiences of touch by transforming them into abstract representations. The poet eventually solves this paradox by exploiting the tactile nature of language itself, using it to bridge the gap between physical sensation and linguistic expression. |
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