Peter Stitt

Bio: Peter Stitt is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poetry & Close reading. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 9 citations.

A poetry of presence : the writing of William Carlos Williams

Abstract: William Carlos Williams was an inventive writer never confined by any static genre or aesthetic postulate. In this authoritative study, Bernard Duffey recognizes that literary dynamism as he approaches the full breadth of Williams s work including his poetry, prose, fiction, and drama as an interrelated and interdependent web of writing. The result, the first truly comprehensive examination of a major American author and his kinetic art, will interest students and scholars of Williams, American literature, and modern poetry and criticism. Central to Duffey s study is a critical framework based on Kenneth Burke s "A Grammar of Motives" and the perception of the poet as an agent working in relation to a scene and its content in this case, the geographical and cultural locale that Williams clung to. Williams s work, Duffey argues, was informed by the dramatic sense of himself as a literary actor seeking embodiment of a dynamic, altering whole and his present condition of being. Ultimately, he stresses, the writer was more engaged in expressing literary action than in forging literary objects. Duffey amplifies this critical view through a close reading of specific works. Examining Williams s principal writings in the lights that seem most immediate to them, he tackles a variety of themes: the pervasiveness of scene in "In the American Grain" and the fiction; the role of agent or poetic person in "Kora in Hell, A Voyage to Pagany, Paterson," and "Pictures from Brueghel;" the function of poetic agency in the short poems, and of poetic action in Williams s drama."

Presence: A Concept Analysis

Abstract: Healthy therapeutic relationships enhance wholeness and healing; they are the key to effective health promotion. Therapeutic nursing presence demonstrates caring, empathy, and connection, qualities...

In Search of the Low-Down Americano: H. H. Lewis, William Carlos Williams, and the Politics of Literary Reception, 1930–1950

Abstract: IN his quest to define America through poetry, to unearth the roots that give meaning to the land and its people, in a language “modified by our environment; the American environment” (Int 59). William Carlos Williams found an obscure and oddly gifted companion, whose quest intersected with his own at critical crossings in both poets’ lives. An inquiry into these crossings helps illuminate the climate of literary reception and the conditions of literary production that affected the recognition of both. “Of all the American modernists,” Charles Tomlinson writes, “Williams was the most tardy in receiving recognition. His writing lifetime was dominated by the literary criteria of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism, in neither of whose terminology was there a place for the kind of thing Williams was concerned with doing” (Williams, Selected Poems xvi). On a lower register, and for reasons that had as much to do with Lewis’s erratic temperament as the politics of literary reception, the same might be said of H. H. Lewis. The studies of Paul L. Mariani, in his seminal biography of Williams, Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery, and Jack Salzman, in Years of Protest, citing the friendship and contested interventions between Williams and Lewis, began the essential spadework, but a more thorough investigation of the particularities and consequences of the WilliamsLewis connection is needed. In the following study, drawing from correspondence, contemporary

Changing Images of Healers

Abstract: Traditionally, the image of healer in our culture has meant the portrait of a white male physician. Seen ideally, he is a heroic fighter against disease and death, a skilled repairman, a compassionate comfortersomething like a knight, a magician, and a benevolent father all in one. Extremely negative images range from the quack to the patronizing, cold, and arrogant manipulator. Some of today's scholarship continues to examine images of the white male doctor as healer. The past ten years, however, have seen a shift of attention to nontraditional images of healers. Volume 2 of Literature and Medicine, Images of Healers, helped stimulate that shift by looking at images of nurses, shamans and con men, patients, family, friends, even the narrative process—all as healers.1

“Terrible intimacy:” Modernist destruction and recreation in Williams’s poetics

Abstract: Perhaps in keeping with Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Make it new,” the modernist poetics of William Carlos Williams thrives on the dialectics of destruction and recreation, descent and reemergence, isolation and contact—a poetics that reflects the doctor-poet’s views on natural and social processes. Stripped of conventional and sentimental associations in contact with the poet’s isolated but sympathetic imagination, each particular thing must reemerge in its vivid and authentic presence. But are all “things,” all objects of poetry, on equal footing in the dynamics of poetic destruction and recreation—objects, words, social entities, individuals? On the one hand, the poet’s humanism combines with curiosity and sensual fascination as he gently delivers the human subject from obliterated social constructs, in rebirth. On the other, he inclines more toward destruction in his treatment of the “intimate” woman, who somehow channels social constructs back into his imagination, thereby threatening his creative equanimity and becoming an impossible poetic object herself. Often missed in literary criticism is the fact that it is the figure of the intimate woman—rather than the distant woman—that brings out the ruthless poet-god in Williams. Disintegrating the intimate woman into a thingly physicality in an unfulfilled and ambivalent project of remaking, the poet in fact both celebrates and regrets his destructiveness in intimacy and its poeticization. The intimate woman in Williams’s poems problematizes what we mean when we talk about “destruction and recreation” in modernist aesthetics.