\"William Carlos Williams\'s Syphilitic Muse,\" Paideuma 42 (2015): 223-249

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ROBERT VOLPICELLI WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS’S SYPHILITIC MUSE William Carlos Williams survived the 1918 influenza outbreak only to arrive at another health crisis, this time an intensely personal one emerging out of his acquaintance with the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Williams initially became aware of the Baroness, a protégée of Marcel Duchamp, through stories of her shocking Dadaist self-fashioning, which—as Williams’s biographer Paul Mariani recounts—sometimes involved her wearing little besides a “coal scuttle” or “ice cream spoons” (161). His first encounter with this provocative woman took place over breakfast, after he had bailed her out of a detention center. That morning he discovered his peculiar delight in the Baroness’s apparent degeneracy, recalling in his short story “The Three Letters” that he found a “strong charm” in the way she appeared as “America personified in the filth of its own imagination” (11). Although over their next few meetings Williams was pleased to find his flirtations reciprocated, at a certain point the Baroness’s overtly sexual advances became too much, causing him to attempt a clean break—“attempt” because she continued pursuit, going so far as to track Williams down at his Rutherford home. In his Autobiography (1951), Williams glibly summarized the ensuing conflict: “The Baroness, though, didn’t leave me so easily” (166). The comment speaks as much to the Baroness’s relentless pursuit as it does to Williams’s continuing fascination with her. Indeed, a particular conversation that seemed to define their relationship still clearly lingered on the poet’s mind: “Yes. I met her, all right! Once later she had an intimate talk with me and advised me that what I needed to make me great was to contract syphilis from her and so free my mind for serious art” (165). 223

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This episode—probably modernism’s most uncomfortable love story—has become a relatively familiar one within Williams criticism, subjected to several different treatments since the publication of Williams’s Autobiography. Setting the tone for biographical accounts like Mariani’s, Dickran Tashjian uses the encounter to frame the tension between the European avant-garde and Williams’s own Americanist proclivities. To this end, Tashjian focuses on a singularly antagonistic, published exchange: after their fallout, the Baroness staged an attack on Williams’s “provincialism” in an essay for the Little Review, to which Williams responded in the pages of Contact by publishing “The Three Letters,” a nativist defense of his “maiden America” (99, 101). Yet Herbert Leibowitz, thinking specifically about the genre of autobiography, casts this entire scene as having less to do with artistic principles than the “troubling pleasure” Williams took in women, reading the poet’s portrayal of his “entanglement” with the Baroness as exemplary of how “he handles romantic imbroglios as comic mishaps” (253, 256). Recent critics have been more outspokenly critical of these “comic” representations. Indeed, the most substantial readings of the Baroness-Williams meeting have come from feminist scholars such as Irene Gammel and Amelia Jones, the latter of whom argues to great effect that Williams’s published responses to the “voraciously heterosexual” Baroness recast their consensual relations in “violently misogynistic” terms (7).1 These feminist critiques in particular deserve to be heeded. And yet, for all the chroniclings of this story, none of the retellings has grappled fully with what easily seems to be the most striking part of the saga, the Baroness’s offer to supply Williams with syphilis. I argue here that following this diseased declaration of art and love leads to a new and rather unexpected version of Williams, one fascinated by decadence as the aestheticization of illness. With respect to modern American poetry, multiple critics have claimed that male poets such as Pound and Eliot pitched their muscular craft against the effeminacy and sickliness they associated with their decadent European precursors.2 Yet Williams’s case appears decidedly more complex. Despite their bad breakup, Williams still found himself deeply attracted to the Baroness, whose archaic German title immediately calls to mind the kind of decadence that sig-

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nifies the decline of European aristocracy. Even more central to Williams’s understanding of the Baroness’s decadence, though, was his preoccupation with her syphilis, the infamous “French disease” that was so prevalent during the fin-de-siècle that Max Nordau decided to list it among the signs of a decadent culture in his influential tome Degeneration (1892) (34). In this same book, Nordau places himself in opposition to another important fin-de-siècle observer (and potential syphilitic), Friedrich Nietzsche, who also associated decadence and disease but to radically different ends.3 Charles Bernheimer has sought to recover a decadent strain in Nietzsche’s thinking, arguing that the philosopher found himself strangely intrigued by the personal declines of disease, seeing sickness not only as a necessary part of health, but as a means of transforming the body into “a complex field of competing interpretations and valuations” (17). Put differently, sickness’s bodily disorientations permit different vantage points on the world, making us aware of our embodied perspectivity and its fluctuations. While Bernheimer’s work shows that Nietzsche ultimately rejected the seductive perspectives of illness, it is worth noting here that this decision was not in any way a clear-cut one. In “The Case of Wagner” (1888), for instance, the philosopher attributes his entire career to decadent illness, which he identifies as a sort of “magnifying glass” allowing for intensified self-observation (160). Such an attitude toward the visionary aspects of disease offers one way to make sense of the Baroness’s claim that, as Mariani phrases it, “the flowering gift of syphilis” would free Williams’s mind, “leaving only the flame of his art” (162). If Williams rejected this “gift,” then he still took the decadent idea behind it—disease’s potential for unlocking new, aesthetic vision—very seriously, incorporating it into his writing at the time. Williams’s ill-fated rendezvous with the Baroness coincided with his collecting a series of improvisational prose poems for what would become Kora in Hell.4 The myth of Kora (another name for Persephone) chronicles her marriage to Hades, which required her to spend one third of the year withdrawn from the earth’s surface. Each spring, however, she would stage a spectacular, chthonic rebirth, emerging from hell in the form of new vegetation. In “The Three Letters,” Williams gestures at how the

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Baroness became a substitute Kora figure with a decadent twist. Describing how he “licked down” the Baroness’s “fragrant poi” stink with “huge relish,” he writes, “Into the pits in the ground it had gone sweet and creamy and out it had come suited to famine until the taste had superseded all others—rancid” (11). Here Williams imagines the Baroness—or her stench, at least—cycling through the underworld like Kora, only to reemerge on the other side as rancidness instead of verdant growth. Such a vision exemplifies how the misogynistic tendencies Gammel and Jones identify overlap with Williams’s decadent obsession with decay and disease, which completely erases the person of the Baroness to put the focus on her transformative, degenerate powers. This program of erasure speaks to how Kora generally handles the Baroness, who is only present in the book through her “flowering gift of syphilis,” which—like some kind of perverse Persephone—blossoms through the surface of Williams’s text at various locations. In what follows, I read these syphilitic traces as a way of uncovering the decadence that appears endemic to Williams’s poetry at this stage of his career. Naturally, Williams knew much about syphilis from medical school, where he learned among other things that the disease first presents as a “small red papule” and then, in its advanced stages, attacks the nerves, causing dementia, blindness, and eventually paralysis (Osler 238).5 In Kora, he employs syphilis’s exterior signs, along with its nervous-system deteriorations, to register a decadent perspective that relishes in the disorientations of disease. In a way, the Baroness already diagnosed this side of Williams’s work, writing in her Little Review essay that Kora is “yoked by neurasthenia” (qtd. in Jones 8), a nervous condition that degeneration theorists like Nordau ascribed to decadents. For a decadent writer, though, such a condition was not necessarily inhibiting; neurasthenia could effectively produce what I call a neuraesthetic, an artistic mode that follows Nietzsche’s visionary sickness in harnessing the cognitive deteriorations of illness to release new sensual perceptions and aesthetic forms. In truth, an earlier recognition of neuraesthetics might actually belong to Nordau, who argued that modernist aesthetic movements were a consequence of diseased minds.6 But while Nordau sought to extinguish this social illness, self-proclaimed decadents such as Charles Baudelaire worked to exacerbate it. Thus, despite

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the fact that Baudelaire seems an improbable companion for Williams on account of the latter’s crusade for a truly American art, I aim to show that his decadent perspective informs Kora at almost every turn.7 I also maintain that uncovering Williams’s repressed fraternity with a decadent past has the additional benefit of clarifying his affiliation with such avant-garde contemporaries as the Dadaists, with whom he shared a decadent interest in illness.8 A combination already embodied to a certain extent by the Baroness, decadence and Dada converge in Kora under the sign of syphilis, a disease that Williams uses to transmit an aesthetic suitable for, and perhaps inseparable from, a distinctly modern malaise. i. sickly flowers, venereal verses Williams seldom made reference to Baudelaire, yet one of those significant instances appears in Kora’s “Prologue,” where he performs a stock-taking of modern poetry that gradually transforms into an artistic manifesto. Especially critical of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’s foreign allegiances, Williams asserts, “But our prize poems are especially to be damned not because of superficial bad workmanship, but because they are rehash, repetition . . . in another way of Verlaine, Baudelaire, Maeterlinck” (Imaginations 24). Evoking prominent French decadents Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the neurasthenic dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, Williams’s remark could easily be construed as a complaint against decadence. More certainly, though, he directs this railing at “rehash” and “repetition” of every kind, offering as a solution to this “bad workmanship” a program of innovation for innovation’s sake: “Nothing is good save the new” (23). In fact, in a later letter to Theodore Roethke concerning Roethke’s newly published volume The Lost Son (1948), Williams indicates that he holds nothing against Baudelaire in particular and even suggests that there may be moments in which it is appropriate to exhume the fin-de-siècle writer: It’s your thought I like better than your verses, your verses as music that is. I think the music is conventional, but in the thought there is a curious “decay” that is a just comment on your world. Baudelaire with his absolute honesty and unflinching stare at corruption and disease as inconsequential and part of the flesh (my own interpretation) had the same quality. (qtd. in Kusch 67)

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Although, as Robert Kusch argues, this assessment of Roethke’s poetry may lack a certain “diplomacy” (67), Williams’s mentioning of Baudelaire here is instructive. It shows that he is able to separate his critique of Roethke’s “conventional” verse from his praise of Roethke’s thought, which he claims exhibits a Baudelairean “quality” (67). Instead of reproaching Roethke as he did Pound and Eliot in the “Prologue,” Williams in this case approves of the borrowing because of the way Roethke updates the Frenchman, using Baudelaire’s sense of “curious ‘decay’” to offer a “just comment” on his own world. Roethke thus avoids “rehash” by making Baudelaire new, a notion already familiar from Kora, where Williams offers his own reinvigoration of fin-de-siècle decadence. The “unflinching stare at corruption and disease” that Williams mentions at the end of his letter represents an integral aspect of Baudelaire’s decadence, which found its fullest expression in his 1857 poem “A Carcass.” Exhibiting, as Williams would put it, a “curious” interest in “‘decay,’” this poem exemplifies the kind of perversion that Nordau took to be symptomatic of the decadent’s “shattered brain” (vi)—an internal corruption that expresses itself in unhealthy desires. “A Carcass” opens on the speaker and his lover as they enjoy a summer stroll, an idyllic scene Baudelaire immediately spoils by planting a revolting surprise in the road ahead: “By a bend in the path a carcass reclined / On a bed sown with pebbles and stones” (“Au détour d’un sentier une charogne infâme / Sur un lit semé de cailloux”) (58–59). Such a spectacle would produce revulsion in most, but Baudelaire’s speaker becomes utterly engrossed in the corpse as a site of creativity. The many permutations of decay prompt this speaker to find in the object a series of potential forms, imagining it, for instance, as a prostitute reclined on a “bed,” exposing her “festering womb” (59). Yet these transformations only underscore the fact that this carcass already moves without the aid of the speaker’s imagination: insects buzz in and around the animal, which inflates with so much gas and liquid that “One could say that this carcass, blown with vague breath, / Lived in increasing itself” (“On eût dit que le corps, enflé d’un souffle vague, / Vivait en se multipliant”) (60–61). By the poem’s conclusion, the corpse swells into a fullblown aesthetic experience, as this “whole teeming world made a

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music sound” (61). Such orchestrations show that from Baudelaire’s perspective decay elicits the evanescent experience of beauty, so much so that rotting flesh appears to his speaker as “flowers in bloom” (61). These blooms of decay anticipate the “flowering gift of syphilis” that the Baroness later implanted in Williams’s imagination. Yet Baudelaire’s “Sickly Flowers” (as he renames them in his book’s dedication to Théophile Gautier [3]) own an even more foundational role in Williams’s poetry. The first sections of Kora, improvisation i, nos. 1 and 2, take the decadent elements that make up “A Carcass” and refashion Baudelaire’s tightly rhymed lyric into the aggressively modernized form of two fragmentary prose poems:9 1 Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is penny-royal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi. 2 For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up there by the cemetery.” “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks.” Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at the toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year’s-master’s-daughter’s two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust loose! (Imaginations 31)

Following Baudelaire’s poem, Kora quickly stumbles upon another carcass, that of the vagrant Jacob Louslinger. As Roy Miki notes, the poem initially interpolates an “empty” reaction to Jacob’s death (76): “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadow for a couple of weeks.” Following this benumbed perspective, however,

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the improvisation introduces the kind of Baudelairean vision that appreciates decay as a wonderfully productive process, in effect disintegrating the distinctions between life and death, between the animate and the inert. In Baudelaire’s poem, this blurring of conceptual boundaries originates with the carcass’s “festering womb”—an abrasive symbol of a decadent reproduction that spawns life and sickness all at the same time. Williams conjures the same confusion of growth and decay in placing his “big womb” alongside some “pennyroyal”—a flower known as both cure-all and an abortion-inducing agent—as well as “fairy-ring mushrooms,” which grow and reproduce via decomposition.10 In next applying this sense of ambivalent proliferation to Jacob’s corpse, Williams’s speaker again recalls Baudelaire by envisioning this decaying body as a beautiful bouquet of “flowers in bloom”: lilies, meadow flowers, mallow, and marigolds. Full of rapturous exclamations over the powers of decay (“Rot dead marigolds an acre at a time!”), the perverse pleasure Kora’s speaker experiences while watching this corpse come back to life may even exceed that contained in Baudelaire’s poem. With laughter, he recognizes decay’s inevitable primacy: “the great pink mallow,” one of the corpse-flowers, triumphs over all worldly concerns, from the “closet full of clothes” to the “two cows” that need care. None of these things look very significant next to decadence’s endless cycles of destruction and remaking. But for both Williams and Baudelaire, decadence does more than aim to produce the fertilizer for new growth. In a sense, it is accurate to say, as Miki does, that Kora’s “deathling”—Williams’s morbid play on the term “earthling”—will become “the ground out of which flowers will grow” (75). Yet, at the same time, casting this improvisation’s decay as the fuel for some countervailing process of creation misses the way that artistic decadence raises decomposition into an aesthetic worth achieving in its own right. As David Weir suggests in his study of this aesthetic, decadence does not simply seek to recognize decomposition as a natural fact so much as it looks to heighten decay by transforming it into decoration.11 Along these same lines, Williams’s improvisation does not depict a carcass that, over time, decomposes into the food for flowers; rather, the speaker directly imagines the decaying matter of Jacob’s shoes as “incredible lilies!”,

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suggesting that here the decay is itself the flowers. Accepting decay as an end in itself rather than a means toward some other product, Kora’s speaker allows fragmentation (“toes, heels, tops, sides, soles”) to persist where formerly there was a whole (Jacob’s shoes, and before that, Jacob himself). This valorization of the part over the whole has long been associated with decadence’s refusal to abide by the “total organism” of a functioning society (Bernheimer 10). Yet rather than being anxious to transform these decayed parts into a reconstituted whole, decadents such as Baudelaire were able to find a strangely sensual call in the decomposing form of fragmented remains, no matter how macabre the process.12 Indeed, the decadent sensualization of decay appears explicitly at the end of “A Carcass” when Baudelaire’s speaker addresses his lover: —And you, in your turn, will become as rotten as this: Horrible, filthy, undone, O sun of my nature and star of my eyes, My passion, my angel in one! (60–61) —Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, A cette horrible infection, Étoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature, Vous, mon ange et ma passion!” (60–61)

Revising the conventional carpe-diem poem, the speaker locates consummation not in a love hastened by time but in the very fact that all life ends in filth and death, collapsing the carcass (his “passion”) and lover (his “angel”) into a single rotten image. Here is Baudelaire making disease, as Williams puts it in his Roethke letter, very much a “part of the flesh.” The erotic dimension of decay—which Williams pithily summarizes at the end of his improvisation as “age’s lust”—also manifests itself in the diseased sexuality of syphilis; and with respect to venereal verse-making Baudelaire once more acts as an important precursor. In Baudelaire’s “I love the thought . . .”, the speaker harks back to “ancient, naked days” that are filled with ideal images of health and beauty: “Pure fruit unsullied, lovely to the sight, / Whose smooth, firm flesh went asking for the bite!” (“Fruits purs de tout outrage et

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vierges de gerçures, / Dont la chair lisse et ferme appelait les morsures”) (18–19). Unfortunately, though, such enticing images are lost to the contemporary world, where there exists only a “terrible and bleak tableau” of “Monstrosities” and “Bodies grotesque” (21). Yet instead of giving rise to despair, the speaker contrasts this ancient idealism with a debased modernity to achieve a rather ironic—and typically Baudelairean—conclusion: It’s true, we have in our corrupted states Beauties unknown to ancient people’s tastes: Visages gnawed by sores of syphilis, And one might say, beauties of listlessness; But these inventions of our tardy muse Never avert the sickly modern crew From rendering to youth their deepest bow, —To holy youth, to smooth, untroubled brow, To limpid eye, to air of innocence, Who pours out on us all, indifferent As flowers, birds, the blue of the sky or seas, His perfumes, songs, his sweet vitality! (Flowers 20–21) Nous avons, il est vrai, nations corrumpues, Aux peuples anciens des beautés inconnues: Des visages rongés par les chancres du cœur, Et comme qui dirait des beautés de langueur; Mais ces inventions de nos muses tardives N’empêcheront jamais les races maladives De rendre à la jeunesse, un hommage profond, —A la sainte jeunesse, à l’air simple, au doux front, A l’œil limpide et clair ainsi qu’une eau courante, Et qui va répandant sur tout, insouciante Comme l’azur du ciel, les oiseaux et les fleurs, Ses parfums, ses chansons et ses douces chaleurs! (Flowers 20–21)

This poetic declaration epitomizes what Weir, applying the terms of Nietzsche’s moral philosophy to aesthetics, calls decadence’s “transvaluation of the values of art” (15). In an epoch consumed by corruption (as with Baudelaire’s modern landscape), the conventional values of art seem corrupt and the corrupt, in turn, seems beautiful. The speaker asserts that the modern age has its “Beauties,” though they will not be recognizable under the older rubrics; these new,

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transvalued splendors are “Visages gnawed by the sores of syphilis” and bodies rotted away by a decadent life of “listlessness” (21). The problem, however, is that the “sickly modern crew” to whom these decadent characteristics belong still looks back on bygone ideals (which likely never existed in the first place). Criticizing this inability to look honestly at our present ugliness, Baudelaire launches into an ironically embellished mode of speech, describing the way his peers bow down “To holy youth, to smooth, untroubled brow,” even when such abstractions are unattainable. The poets of a sickly era, the poem finally suggests, should put into proper focus the illnesses that lie before them; they should learn to discover, even in the most degenerate of scenes, the unexpected “inventions” of a “tardy muse.” Instead of paying homage to “youth” and “vitality,” Kora also genuflects before a “Sick Muse” (to borrow an appropriate phrase from the title of another Baudelaire poem). In fact, the Baudelairean sentiment of looking directly at “the sickly modern crew” plays out explicitly within improvisation xxiv, no. 2, where Williams makes his own poetry out of the “sores of syphilis”: Damn me I feel sorry for them. Yet syphilis is no more than a wild pink in the rock’s cleft. I know that. Radicals and capitalists doing a can-can tread the ground clean. Luck to the feet then. Bring a Russian to put a fringe to the rhythm. What’s the odds? Commiseration cannot solve calculus. Calculus is a stone. Frost’ll crack it. Till then, there’s many a good backroad among the clean raked fields of hell where autumn flowers are blossoming. (Imaginations 77)

He then appends the following commentary: Pathology literally speaking is a flower garden. Syphilis covers the body with salmon-red petals. The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture. Over and above all this floats the philosophy of disease which is a stern dance. One of its most delightful gestures is bringing flowers to the sick. (Imaginations 77–78)

There is the temptation to forgo interpreting these passages as anything other than a collage of unrelated objects.13 Yet this section of Kora does accumulate a number of what Fredric Jameson calls “thematic outbursts” (9)—Williams’s repetitions of tropes, as in the above quotation’s dances and dancers, salmon reds and bright pinks,

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diseases and medicine, flowers and gardens—creating a complex web of correspondences that suggests the overall importance of these syphilitic musings. The speaker’s enigmatic claim that “syphilis is no more than a wild pink” becomes clearer in the commentary’s following visualization of the disease’s skin lesions as a set of “salmonred petals.” This floral pattern, highlighted further by the scarlet tones of hellish “autumn” flowers, recalls the decadent fields of “incredible lilies!” that germinated out of Jacob’s corpse at Kora’s opening. Taken together, this presence of bright colors and spectacular flowers contributes to the sense that Williams is following the decadent program by transforming disease and decay into decoration. Such an aesthetic of illness, Kora’s speaker admits, is not for everyone: the improvisation’s “Radicals and capitalists,” insensitive to the subtitles of sickness, use their “can-can” dance to “tread the ground clean” of such flowerings. Grouping Williams in with these dancers, Brian Bremen concludes in his study of Williams’s diagnostic poetry that this speaker’s goal is to “cure” syphilis by “bringing flowers to the sick,” meaning that in translating disease into something beautiful the poet can offer a form of alleviation (108–10). Such a reading overlooks the fact that the empathetic act of “bringing flowers to the sick,” besides signaling a return of health, could just as easily represent one’s response to an incurable or terminal illness. It also underestimates the way that Kora’s flowers have already been loaded with a decadent curiosity about decay, suggesting that Williams’s poetic agenda here might already diverge from his daytime profession of doctoring. In truth, Williams puts aside the imperative to cure in order to examine more closely the transcendent powers of disease. His formula—“The study of medicine is an inverted sort of horticulture”— seems to recognize that if the purpose of horticulture is to cultivate blossoms, then the physician’s job is to do the opposite, suppressing the blossoming of sickness. Kora definitively turns away from such an obligation in order to attend to what is ostensibly a higher power: “the philosophy of disease,” which, as Williams’s speaker put it, “floats” over everything, including the values of medicine. In other words, Kora’s perspective shifts here to focus on the philosophical work that syphilis does on its own terms. Understanding this philosophy requires returning to the speaker’s claim that “syphilis is no

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more than a wild pink in the rock’s cleft.” After this rock we have the “stone” of “calculus,” which stands in for a rigid and unbending kind of logic, the effect of which is a sort of deadening calcification.14 “Commiseration”—a gesture like “bringing flowers to the sick”— “cannot solve” the problems posed by such inflexible thinking, so Williams implies that the only way to escape these barriers is to break through them entirely. To this end, he calls on syphilis, a disease that assails the soundness of one’s mind, to step in and serve this function by getting into the “clefts” of calculus’s stone, rationality’s rock. Syphilis’s stealthy position in the rock’s “cleft” further links it to this passage’s oncoming “frost,” which will slowly seep into its granite crevices only to fracture the whole structure upon freezing. This image stands as yet another way of picturing syphilis’s furtive yet natural assault on the rigidity of conventional thought, the dissolution of which makes way for a new kind of thinking, a logic extracted from the very nature of disease. ii. on neuraesthetics With her proposed “gift” the Baroness implied that syphilis’s neurological disruptions promise a kind of mental liberation. The idea was seductive to Williams, who despite having been “schooled in the dangers from syph, maternity, heartbreak and the clap,” found that “[e]verything about [the Baroness] gave him joy: her broken teeth, her syphilis, everything; it was part of it, the more so the better” (“The Three Letters” 10–11). In propelling him toward known “dangers,” this unhealthy attraction to disease connects Williams’s decadent impulse to the self-destructive avant-gardism of the Dadaists. On the one hand, there is an aspect of Dada that defines itself against fin-de-siècle decadence; for example, Dada’s founder, Tristan Tzara, ridiculed decadence and reversed its terms when he revised the decadent anthem of l’art pour l’art into the doubly irreverent Dadaist slogan, “anti-art for anti-art’s sake” (qtd. in Calinescu 96). On the other hand, avant-garde theorists such as Matei Calinescu have made note of the affinity between the historical avant-garde and its decadent predecessors: “As a culture of crisis, the avant-garde is consciously involved in furthering the ‘natural’ decay of traditional forms in our world of change, and does its best to intensify and dramatize all exist-

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ing symptoms of decadence and exhaustion” (124).15 In Kora, Williams plays out this claim, bringing decadence forward into the twentieth century by wedding syphilis’s erosion of the mind to Dadaist irrationality. Yet in doing so he ultimately finds the disease too potent. That is, just as Williams had backed down from the Baroness, he also shies away from the consequences of syphilis—but not without first acknowledging his art’s neuraesthetic reliance upon this brain-breaking illness. Williams immediately puts his investment in Dada on display in Kora, using his “Prologue” to announce his siding with the international avant-garde over a more mainstream Anglo-American modernism. Williams goes through some of the most prominent modernists of his day, deftly lampooning each of them in turn. In addition to Eliot, whose work Williams disregarded as derivative, and Pound, whom he calls “the best enemy United States verse has,” there is H.D., who “misses the entire intent of what [Williams is] doing,” and “fat” Wallace Stevens, “thawing out so beautifully at forty!” (Imaginations 13, 26, 27). Meanwhile, the rest of the “Prologue” reads like a paean to avant-garde art, heralding the techniques of “Gleizes, Man Ray, Demuth, Duchamp—all of whom were then in the city” (8). In particular, Williams recounts a conversation with the owner-operator of Others magazine, Walter Arensberg, who avers that “anything in paint that is truly new, truly a fresh creation is good art” (8). This prompts Williams to summarize Duchamp’s artistic program: “Thus according to Duchamp, who was Arensberg’s champion at the time, a stained-glass window that had fallen out and lay more or less together on the ground was of far greater interest than the thing conventionally composed in situ” (8). Put differently, Duchamp’s method is to take an object out of its context in order to increase the viewer’s attention to its aesthetic details, raising something ordinary to the level of a “truly . . . fresh creation,” not by remaking it so much as by thwarting our normal perspectives. Later, when Williams recalled trying to replicate this same Dadaist technique in his own writing, he labeled these poems his “decompositions” (qtd. in Schmidt 91). The notion of decomposition looms large over Williams’s poetic practice in the early 1920s, serving as a particularly apt description of his poetry’s developing formal

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properties. For example, in the passages of Kora discussed in the previous section, where the speaker describes syphilis’s floral arrangements and the “flower garden” of pathology, the improvisational nature of Williams’s prose-poetry works by way of a discontinuous movement from one object to the next, replicating syphilis’s disruption of rational logic on a formal level. And yet, despite its refusal of linearity, the images here still add up across sections of the poem as well as across the book as a whole. Paradoxically, then, decomposition remains a kind of composition—an irrational conclusion that links this formal practice to both Dada and decadence. To be more specific, the act of decomposing becomes a literary-historical pivot point for Williams: it speaks to the way that Duchamp de-composed objects by removing them from their conventional situation, defamiliarizing them; yet it also calls to mind the decay and disease enlisted for the decomposition of Kora’s poetic bodies. This overlap highlights an even more complex exchange in which Williams not only places decadence and Dada alongside one another, but also uses the processes of the former to produce the effects of the latter. Thus, one way to articulate Williams’s neuraesthetic practice is to say that where Duchamp defamiliarized by de-composing objects formally, Williams achieved a similar kind of effect with thematic decomposition, appyling disease to his own poetic vision. Improvisation xxiv, no. 1 (which directly precedes Kora’s syphilitic flowers in xxiv, no. 2) exhibits how disease, in addition to transforming objects for the benefit of a poetic gaze (as in the case of Baudelaire’s decaying carcass), also has the potential to alter the sight of the speaker, who is opened up to unfamiliar dimensions of aesthetic perception. In this improvisation, Williams writes: “Imagination! That’s the worm in the apple. What if it run to paralyses and blind fires, here’s sense loose in a world set on foundation” (Imaginations 77). Referring to the work of worms—agents of decay, and as such a favorite image of decadent poets—the speaker figures the imagination as a corrupting influence.16 In deploying this worm metaphor alongside the Romantic-era notion of “Imagination,” the improvisation makes specific reference to William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose,” in which a phallic “worm” offers “a dark secret love” that “Does thy life destroy” (120). The Blakean allusion to a

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deadly desire not only projects illness onto a phallic worm, which represents male sexuality, thereby complicating the earlier projections onto the Baroness; this “dark secret love” also evokes syphilis’s degeneration of the nervous system by attaching it to such symptoms as “paralyses” and “blind fires.” The phrase “blind fires” in particular signals a kind of synaesthesia, whereby the contraction of disease combines the loss of perception (blindness) with an intensification of other, more elemental sensations (fire). Such a process conjures the sensory magnification Nietzsche attributes to illness, drawing attention here to Williams’s particularly neuraesthetic tendencies. In Degeneration, Nordau considered confused perception, where an increased sensitivity to some sensations overrides one’s capacity to recognize ordinary objects, to be the effect of the decadent’s “shattered brain.” Yet Williams locates in disease’s ability to unlock perception from its normative fixtures—the way it “lets sense loose in a world set on foundation”—a hidden artistic potential. In attacking one’s cognitive “foundation,” syphilis becomes an avenue to heightened aesthetic experiences by occasioning a flood of novel impressions to wash over the senses. While Williams’s discussions of the avant-garde in his “Prologue” already suggest that he was lining up Dada with this sort of diseased aesthetic, there was in fact something of a debate emerging on this subject right around the time he published Kora. According to Tzara, Dada’s most vocal spokesman, Dadaism and disease were opposed forces. For instance, in his “manifesto on bitter love and feeble love” (1920), Tzara implies that Dada was a cure for a disease already infecting society: “Anti-dadaism is a disease: . . . the normal state of man is Dada” (92). Yet Tzara, in what is the typical fashion of a Dadaist manifesto, complicates this claim by falling back on a contradictory stance. In this case, he adds: “But the true dadas are against Dada” (92). In spite of any ambiguity this addendum produces (if real dadas are against Dada, where does that place them in relation to anti-dadaist disease?), Tzara continually asserts Dada’s antagonism to all sorts of illness: “A manifesto is a communication addressed to the whole world, in which there is no other pretension than the discovery of a means of curing instantly political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomic and literary syphilis”

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(86). Still, not everyone was as convinced that Dada acted as an instant cure for these various types of “syphilis.” From the perspective of Eliot’s modernism, Dada appeared as the exact opposite of how Tzara perceived it. In “The Lesson of Baudelaire” (1921), Eliot, initially appearing to agree with Tzara, states that Dada “is a diagnosis of a disease of the French mind” that begins with Baudelaire (143). By then emphasizing the “deformed” nature of Dada’s fin-de-siècle precursors, however, Eliot ultimately makes clear that his real point, as Alan Young argues, is “that Dada was essentially a symptom of a French sickness” (Eliot 144; Young 97, emphasis mine). Thus Eliot, in addition to linking Dada to syphilis by invoking this “French sickness,” concludes, “[W]hatever lesson we extract from [Dada] will not be directly applicable in London” (144). Where Williams lies with respect to these diverging viewpoints—Tzara and Eliot’s—is, perhaps not surprisingly, a little complicated. In linking Kora’s Dadaist decompositions to his syphilitic imagination, Williams in a sense stands with Eliot’s modernism, which associates Dada with, rather than against, disease; but whereas Eliot appears skittish around disease’s decadent associations, Williams was willing to see where this unhealthy art might take him. Williams draws an especially strong parallel between disease and Dadaist practice in the commentary for improvisation v, no. 3, where he details a downward “journey” into the syphilitic condition that culminates with his most detailed articulation of the neuraesthetic experience. This harrowing passage resonates with the speaker’s excursion down through the “backroad” of hell already seen in xxiv, no. 2, where the “autumn flowers” that guide the way recall the perennial decay of the seasons—a cyclical “fall” from life—as well as the salmon-red petals of syphilis. Charting an equally hellish descent, improvisation v, no. 3’s commentary records what it might be for someone like Williams, who typically looks on from the outside, to sink into the depths of syphilis: A man whose brain is slowly curdling due to a syphilitic infection acquired in early life calls on a friend to go with him on a journey to the city. The friend out of compassion goes, and, thinking of the condition of his unhappy companion, falls into pondering on the sights he sees as he is driven up one street and down another. It being evening he witnesses a dawn of great beauty striking backward upon the world in a reverse direction to the sun’s course and not

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knowing of what else to think discovers it to be the same power which has led his companion to destruction. At this he is inclined to scoff derisively at the city’s prone stupidity and to make light indeed of his friend’s misfortune. (Imaginations 40)

The speaker once again singles out syphilis for the way it “slowly curdl[es]” the brain. That this disintegration of the mind has something to do with the avant-garde is first suggested by the fact that Williams locates this improvisation in the city, the site that the “Prologue” connects to “Gleizes, Man Ray, Demuth, Duchamp.” The city, of course, was also a frequent destination for Williams’s own journeys, as he often made the trip from Rutherford to New York to visit patients and meet up with avant-garde acquaintances such as the Baroness. Indeed, as if to provide a continuation of the episode in which the Baroness attempted to “gift” Williams with syphilis, this commentary renders a scenario in which the friend, who is merely accompanying his “unhappy companion” out of “compassion,” contracts something like syphilitic thinking merely through his proximity to the disease. As he ponders his companion’s condition, this friend “falls” into a perspective indicative of syphilis’s mental disorientations, seeing the city’s lights, against all logical explanation, “striking backward upon the world in a reverse direction.” Such a reversal again channels Nietzsche, who attributed his ability to “reverse perspectives,” and thus to break with normative modes of social and moral thinking, to the dizzying experiences of illness (qtd. in Bernheimer 9). Yet this fantastic “striking backward” also evokes Duchamp’s artistic technique of dislodging a “thing conventionally composed in situ” in the way it disorients viewers to offer them a fresh angle on the everyday, locating new sensations in what had become covered over by habit. It is exactly this sort of brain-curdling delusion—which Williams attributes to both Dada and decadence— that finally occasions the commentary’s neuraesthetic experience of the sublime, that is, the “dawn of great beauty” that accompanies this descent into disease. It must be acknowledged that this commentary does not end in a simple affirmation of such a descent. Even as the friend in improvisation v, no. 3, enters the grip of an aesthetic epiphany, he still realizes that the syphilitic force that reorients his world and creates all of

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this beauty is the “same power which has led his companion to destruction.” As David Arnold argues in his assessment of Williams’s avant-garde phase, Williams never found himself entirely comfortable with Dada’s proclivity for “destruction of reality-as-it-is” unless this demolition was balanced with an equal impulse toward creation (134). Certainly, this reluctance to completely embrace devastation complicates Williams’s syphilitic poetics, as, in the early 1920s, if one did not die from the disease, then the prescribed treatment—regular injections of arsenic, bismuth, or mercury—would still likely prove fatal.17 Hence, the idea of completely submitting oneself to illness makes the speaker’s friend—as with Williams and the Baroness— abruptly reject all that is related to those earlier revelations: “At this he is inclined to scoff derisively at the city’s prone stupidity and to make light indeed of his friend’s misfortune.” After touting the aesthetic enhancements offered by the “philosophy of disease,” Williams is certainly not so smug as to “scoff derisively” at the powers of syphilis. In fact, the friend’s rapid rejection of his decadent vision appears rather ingenuous after the seriousness with which Williams portrayed his journey. Improvisation v, no. 3 thus performs a double disavowal: the friend rejects the disease, but Kora’s earnest meditations on disease also urge the reader to reject the friend’s hasty conclusion. This rather conflicted stance allows Williams to take up a third position, one in which he neither fully submits to syphilitic sight nor completely gives up disease as a catalyst for artistic imagination. Williams’s outlook is, in short, that of the perpetual passenger, the friend along for the ride: traveling next to syphilis (in his medical practice as well as in his avant-garde relationships), he still gets to see the way disease steers behavior, the way it takes over consciousness. Although he never went so far as to accept its “gift,” this closeness to disease helped to spur on “the flame of his art.” With the perils of illness ever-present in Kora, it is clear that Williams’s poetic imagination depended on the idea that the poet, like the friend in improvisation v, no. 3’s commentary, might at any moment slip over into syphilis and be utterly destroyed.

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iii. odes to a broken brain Kora’s ambivalent ending already suggests that Williams had a hard time shaking his syphilitic muse. While he never quite returns to the disease as the neuraesthetic conduit he once imagined it to be, its powers still clearly linger well into his later writing career, though its effects are often obscured and sublimated into his formal techniques. In fact, two of Williams’s most recognized works, Spring and All (1923) and Paterson (1946–58), both exhibit traces of his prior syphilitic thinking; they are equally, in a sense, odes to the disease’s broken brains. Yet Williams’s overall relationship with the disease remains the same kind of tumultuous push and pull that characterized his encounters with the Baroness. While Spring and All still displays Williams’s anxiety about coming too close to disease, Paterson shows him worrying about whether he has let his muse get too far away. The specter of syphilis first returns in one of Spring and All’s bestknown poems, no. xxvi, also known as “To Elsie.” To be sure, this poem, with its famous concluding lines, summons Kora’s driver, who momentarily abnegated all of his self-control to disease: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car” (Imaginations 133). What’s more, though, is that “To Elsie” is very much concerned with what Williams had called in Kora the “philosophy of disease.” The eponymous Elsie is “a girl so desolate / so hemmed round / with disease or murder // that she’ll be rescued by an / agent— / reared by the state” (132). From the state’s perspective, “disease” and “murder” operate as interchangeable threats that speak equally to the “desolate” condition of the poor; yet Williams departs from this model of conceptualizing illness by invoking Kora’s syphilitic tropes. The poem establishes a direct link between Elsie’s sexual body—her “voluptuous water” and “great / ungainly hips and flopping breasts”—and her primary symptom, her “broken / / brain,” which Williams emphasizes by stretching across a stanza break (132). Of course, the particulars of Elsie’s life are such that diagnosing the specific illness from which she suffers is impossible. At the same time, however, Elsie’s super-sexualized body (which recalls Williams’s characterizations of the Baroness) along with her “broken / / brain” (the ultimate symptom of syphilis) raise the question as to whether

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this girl contracted a venereal disease while courting one of her “rich young men with fine eyes” (132). The suggestion of syphilis here draws further attention to the evolution of Williams’s formal discontinuities. If the jarring lack of transitions in Kora’s improvisational prose poems signaled the translation of syphilis’s irrational logic over to the formal properties of Williams’s poetry, then the consistently off-kilter line and stanza breaks in “To Elsie” go a step further: replicating the same function as the rockcracking frost in Kora, Williams’s radical enjambment and use of blank space physically register syphilis’s brain-breaking mode of poetic operation. In other words, the typographical gaps in “To Elsie” figure as the diseased gaps of cognitive disorientation. Such a formal departure’s deep resonance with the decadent program already pervading much of Williams’s earlier writing suggests a different, more hellish line running through Spring and All. Usually, critics read “To Elsie” as Williams’s attempt to ameliorate or redeem the kind of diseased degeneration afflicting rural America.18 But uncovering the poem’s syphilitic traces, as well as the resonances between Elsa/Elsie, emphasize the fact that Elsie’s illness is not a sign of weakness. Rather, it lends her a certain power, the ability to express “the truth about us”: “we are degraded prisoners / destined to hunger until we eat filth” (133). While such a degenerate reality, reminiscent of some Baudelairean nightmare, now contains little of Kora’s aesthetic optimism about disease, Elsie seems to be the only one capable of saying what the poet—perhaps the one naively straining after “isolate flecks” of beauty at the poem’s close (133)—wishes he could admit about decadence’s powerful truths. Much later, in Paterson 5 (the last complete book of the series, published in 1958), Williams makes clear that, while he may be quick to deflect disease’s dark reality onto other bodies (the Baroness, Elsie), his poetry would nonetheless suffer from a complete eradication of syphilis. One of Paterson’s intermittent prose sections reintroduces syphilis with a story about the French painter Paul Gauguin, who found out the disease was “no joke” “when his brains began to rot away” (213). In spite of the way this prose piece suggests that Gauguin did not take his affliction seriously, his presence in the poem further underscores a symbiotic relationship between illness and art.

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This connection may not be pertinent in a world where syphilis—as a result of the discovery and proliferation of the easily dispensed penicillin antibiotic, which clears up the disease as if by magic—no longer presents the same threat as it did some thirty years earlier:19 .

the times today are safer for the fornicators the moral’s as you choose but the brain need not putrefy or petrify for fear of venereal disease unless you wish it (Paterson 213–14)

All of the degenerative capacities to which Kora linked syphilis—the rotting of flesh, the petrifaction of the brain—are now severely diminished, and with the disappearance of syphilis’s externalized stigmata of decay, which visually announced one’s sexual transgressions, the social implications of contracting a venereal disease also appear to be lifted. Following formal patterns similar to those established in “To Elsie,” this section of Paterson’s distinct textual aporias, as well as its misaligned and stuttering speech (“need not putrefy / or petrify”), reawaken the possibility that the effects of syphilis have not been completely eradicated when it comes to Williams’s poetry. In fact, the final phrase here—“unless you wish it”—coyly implies that this speaker possibly counts himself among those willing to ignore the aforementioned medical advances in order to continue flirting with disease. This is all to say that, even if syphilis and its effects could be easily dispelled now, such a conclusion would not necessarily elicit much satisfaction from Paterson’s speaker, who goes on to murmur: “Loose your love to flow” while you are yet young male and female (if it is worth it to you) ’n cha cha cha you’d think the brain ’d be grafted on a better root. (Paterson 214)

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Here, the thought of curing syphilis, carried over from the last section, actually leads to a series of deflated ideals, suggesting that in this world relieving disease also diminishes the capacity for poetry itself. The speaker encourages the reader to “Loose your love to flow,” but only “if it is worth it to you,” indicating that a sense of apathy has replaced the formerly serious stakes of his potential indiscretions. Presumably, without the looming perils of decay and decomposition, the speaker can return to an idealization of capricious youth (the same “holy youth, to smooth, untroubled brow” to which Baudelaire’s moderns bow). It is at this point that he also exchanges Kora’s “philosophy of disease,” which is a “stern dance,” with the more frivolous rhythm of “ ’n cha cha cha.” Now, the brain will not break as a result of syphilis creeping into its clefts, and yet what remains of it still appears broken (again, as in “To Elsie,” over a line: “brain / ’d”). What is worse, the intact mind of this postsyphilitic world appears frankly disappointing: “you’d think” it would “be grafted / on a better root.” Trailing off into the blank space of mindlessness, Paterson solemnly regrets, not a fallen state, but a paradise regained. For all its mixed messages, Williams’s poetry laments the overcoming of decline and decay, asking whether the “better roots” missing from the end of Paterson are not those that belong to Jacob Louslinger’s “incredible lilies,” Baudelaire’s “Sickly Flowers,” or—more likely still—the Baroness’s “flowering gift of syphilis.” From his early improvisational poems in the late teens to the final installment of Paterson in the late fifties, the presence of syphilis spans nearly the length of Williams’s career. The disease lingers throughout most of his poetic corpus, sometimes going dormant for years before resurfacing. To be sure, the stubborn persistence of this trope underscores how the development of a neuraesthetics remains one of the most consistent motivating factors in all of Williams’s writing. Yet to place this sort of degenerative art at the center of his poetry is not merely a means of linking together his different phases of writing; it also repositions one of the primary figures in modernist American poetry within a much longer, and much darker, lineage. While many critics are quick to associate Williams with the Dadaists, the aesthetic transmissions of syphilis reveal that he was in fact frequently drawing off the earlier template of a late-nineteenth-century

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decadence, with which he never openly proclaimed ties and against which his generation often positioned itself. With respect to this secreted affiliation with decadence, I doubt that Williams is really alone. Indeed, the way in which much of modernist poetry, in spite of its aspirations to always make things new, silently carries forward the decay and disease of its decadent progenitors remains to be fully diagnosed. notes 1. For a fuller account of Williams’s misogynistic reaction to the Baroness, see Jones 7–10. 2. See Laity, especially 1–28. See also Schulze. 3. According to one of Nietzsche’s most authoritative commentators, Walter Kaufmann, the philosopher “very probably contracted syphilis” (69). Yet whether or not Nietzsche actually did continues to be debated; see Schain. 4. Williams began serializing his improvisations in The Little Review in October of 1917. He eventually published three sections as well as the “Prologue” in the magazine before the Four Seas Company of Boston printed the entire collection as Kora in 1920. 5. I quote here from an edition of the most popular medical text of the time, William Osler’s The Principles and Practice of Medicine. For Osler’s importance to Williams, see Crawford. 6. See Nordau’s chapter on “Zola and his School,” 473–505. 7. For more on Baudelaire’s syphilis, see Hayden 112–19. 8. The criticism dealing with Williams and Dada is extensive. For an overview, see Schmidt 90–91 n.1. The first major treatments of Williams and Dada are by Tashjian and Dijkstra. These and subsequent critics align Williams’s poetry with Dadaist visual art such as Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. For a representative essay, see Sayre, “Ready-Mades.” For a more recent addition, see Halter. 9. It is worth noting that in taking up the prose poem Williams is still, in a sense, following Baudelaire, who did much to pioneer this form in his later work Le Spleen de Paris (1869). 10. For the medicinal properties of pennyroyal, see Castleman 417–21. 11. See Weir’s analysis of Flaubert’s decadence, 30_31. 12. See Bourget’s well-known “Essay.” For an excerpted translation, see “Baudelaire and the Decadent Movement.” 13. For this reason, critics have most often interpreted Kora as a “visual text” that works primarily at the level of form. See, for example, Sayre, The Visual Text. For Kora and collage, see also Dijkstra, Schmidt, and Halter. 14. Bremen points out that “calculus” is also another name for a kidney stone (108). 15. Renato Poggioli maintains similarly that “[f]undamentally there is no great dif-

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ference” between decadence and the avant-garde, as “[d]egeneration and immaturity equally aspire to transcend the self in a subsequent flourishing” (76). 16. In fact, Baudelaire’s “A Carcass,” ends: “Ah then, o my beauty, explain to the worms / Who cherish your body so fine / That I am the keeper for corpses of love / Of the form, and the essence divine!” (63). 17. See Parascandola 71–98. 18. See, for example, Lowney 71–75. 19. See Parascandola 133–55.

works cited Arnold, David. “Wandering with Janus: Situating Rome.” Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Print. Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin-de-Siècle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Print. Blake, William. Selected Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Print. Bourget, Paul. “Essai de psychologie contemporaine: Charles Baudelaire.” La Nouvelle Revue 13 (1881): 398–417. Print. ---. “Baudelaire and the Decadent Movement,” Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Ed. Henri Dorra. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. 128–31. Print. Bremen, Brian. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernist: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987. Print. Castleman, Michael, and Sheldon Hendler. The Healing Herbs: The Ultimate Guide to the Curative Power of Nature’s Medicines. New York: Random House, 1995. Print. Crawford, Hugh. Modernism, Medicine, & William Carlos Williams. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1993. Print. Dijkstra, Bram. Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969. Print. Eliot, T. S. “The Lesson of Baudelaire.” The Annotated Wasteland with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. Ed. Lawrence Rainey. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006. 144–45. Print. Gammel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002. Print. Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print. Hayden, Deborah. Genius, Madness and the History of Syphilis. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Print.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Modernist Papers. London, Verso, 2007. Print. Jones, Amelia. Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004. Print. Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2013. Kusch, Robert. “My Toughest Mentor”: Theodor Roethke and William Carlos Williams (1940–1948). Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1999. Print. Laity, Cassandra. H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. Leibowitz, Herbert. Fabricating Lives: Explorations in American Autobiography. New York: Knopf, 1989. Print. Lowney, John. The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Cranbury, NJ: Associated UP, 1997. Print. Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: Norton, 1990. Print. Miki, Roy. The Prepoetics of William Carlos Williams: “Kora in Hell.” Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Case of Wagner.” The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1967. Print. Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1993. Print. Osler, William. The Principles and Practice of Medicine. 4th ed. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1901. Print. Parascandola, John. Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Print. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge. Harvard UP, 1968. Print. Sayre, Henry. The Visual Text of William Carlos Williams. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1983. Print. ---. “Ready-Mades and Other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams.” Journal of Modern Literature 8.1 (1980): 3–22. Print. Schain, Richard. The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Print. Schmidt, Peter. William Carlos Williams, The Arts, and Literary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. Print. Schulze, Robin. The Degenerate Muse: American Nature, Modernist Poetry, and the Problem of Cultural Hygiene. Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming. Tashjian, Dickran. Skyscraper Primitives: Dada and the American Avant-Garde, 1910–1925. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975. Print. Tzara, Tristan. “manifesto on feeble love and bitter love.” Dada: Painters and Poets. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. 86–96. Print. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995. Print.

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Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967. Print. ---. Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. Print. ---. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1992. Print. ---. “The Three Letters.” Contact 4 (Summer 1921): 10–13. Print. Young, Alan. Dada and After: Extremist Modernism and English Literature. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1981. Print.