Harold Norse Under the Sign of William Carlos Williams

This essay studies Harold Norse's 10-year literary tutelage with William Carlos Williams primarily through a vibrant correspondence collected in The American Idiom: A Correspondence. Their poetics debates center on and expand understandings of Williams's American idiom and enigmatic "variable foot," which can be traced back to Whitman, assessed with a view toward explaining how Norse became a "Beat poet" in light of their shared skepticism of the Beats. Special emphasis on Norse's pre-postmodernism, his straddling of the modern-postmodern "Great Divide" as identified by Andreas Huyssen sharpen the period distinctions. Discussion of the chronic and productive debates over Norse's works that both reflect Williams's poetics and critiques, and openly challenge them to go his own way traces Norse's emergence as an original in the postwar American lineage. The essay examines Norse's translations, The Sonnets of G.G. Belli, which generated contention with Williams's friend and Norse's antisemitic scourge, the titan of modernism Ezra Pound. Norse's mid-twentieth century translations of Belli's nineteenth century sonnets are seen to be an understudied proving ground for several avant-garde and established postwar developments in Anglophone poetry that Norse adapts, improvises, and masters.