The Borders of Things

American Aesthetic

I'm beginning the process of putting together my reading lists. Here is a passage I stumbled across from William Carlos Williams's brief essay "Descent":

There is nothing for a man but genius or despair. We cannot answer in the smart language, certainly it would be a bastardization of our own talents to waste time to learn the language they use. I would rather sneak off and die like a sick dog then be a well known literary person in America--and no doubt I'll do it in the end. Our betters we may bitterly advise: Know nothing (i.e., the man on the street), make no attempt to know. With a foreign congeries of literary claptrap, come without coutesy to a strange country and make for youself a smooth track to the pockets of the mob by catering to a "refined" taste and soiling that which you do not know how to estimate. Courtesy would at least bid him be informed or keep still. . . .

However hopeless it may seem, we have no other choice: we must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is must be destroyed.