Volume 22, Number 18 · November 13, 1975
Art, Life & Dr. Williams
By Helen Vendler
William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America
by Robert Coles
Rutgers University Press, 185 pp., $8.50
William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey
by Reed Whittemore
Houghton Mifflin, 404 pp., $10.95
The Embodiment of Knowledge
by William Carlos Williams, edited by Ron Loewinsohn
New Directions, 198 pp., $18.75
The current admiration for the 'interdisciplinary' is probably no more permanent than any other educational whim, but it has led to a certain ridiculous appropriation of the arts. I think of things like a foundation-funded course where first the kids learn what a biologist can tell them about 'Nature and Man,' and then what an ecologist can tell them, ditto, and then what Wordsworth, etc. Nobody spoiled the game by suggesting to the kids that Wordsworth wasn't telling them about Nature, he was telling them about Wordsworth. And there the whole enterprise founders. It doesn't founder in the sciences, whose working interdisciplinary teams were observed (by 'humanists') and taken as models; it may not so founder in the social sciences (which have, however, fewer common languages than the natural sciences); but it can and must founder whenever the arts are involved, and for good reason: however much art may make reference to a variety of subjects, its importance is fundamentally nonreferential.
Review, 3297 words
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