ebster Schott. Yet, as Hugh Fox reported, few peers shared Williams's enthusiasm for the book. Pound called it "incoherent" and "un-American"; H.D. objected to its "flippancies," its "self-mockery," its "un-seriousness"; and Wallace Stevens complained about Williams's "tantrums." Fox defended the avant-garde Williams against his critics by saying, "Anything hitherto undone is tantrums, flippancy, opacity... they don't see (as Williams does) that they are confronting a new language and they have to learn how to decipher it before they can savor it." Surrounded by criticism, Williams became increasingly defensive during this time. His prologue to Kora came from his need "to give some indication of myself to the people I knew; sound off, tell the world-- especially my intimate friends--how I felt about them." With or without allies, Williams was determined to continue the advances he felt he had made in American poetry. What Williams did not foresee, however, was the "atom bomb" on modern poetry--T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Williams had no quarrel with Eliot's genius--he said Eliot was writing poems as good as Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"--but, simply, "we were breaking the rules, whereas he was conforming to the excellencies of classroom English." As he explained in his Autobiography, "I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself--rooted in the locality which should give it fruit." Not only did Williams feel threatened by Eliot's success, but also by the attention The Waste Land received. As Karl Shapiro pointed out, "he was left high and dry: Pound, who was virtually the co- author of Eliot's poems, and Marianne Moore were now polarized to Eliot. Williams felt this and would feel it for another twenty years. His own poetry would have to pr...
