Williams’s Profundity: Pragmatic Naturalism and Distributed Poetic Thinking

ABSTRACT:This essay reads Williams’s poetry and poetics from the vantage of pragmatic naturalism to clarify the philosophical and pedagogical importance of Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Drawing on the work of John Dewey and contemporary philosophy of mind, it both reconsiders the status of things and objects in Williams’s compositional practice and clarifies the poet’s radical claims for the enabling role of poetry and the arts for human agency and thinking.