News at Eleven: Even after the Second World War,

[William Carlos] Williams couldn't gain a foothold among the New Critics, whose formalist method of literary analysis thoroughly dominated English departments in the U.S. If students read Williams at all, they read him in high school. By the time students reached college, they were expected to get serious about poetry with a capital "p." They read Eliot's "The Waste Land," which fit New Criticism to a T.

Of course, New Criticism was a political movement that strove to conceal its politics. By reading a poem as if it were written in a cultural vacuum, the New Critic was able to get on without the inconvenience of accounting for Eliot's anti-Semitism or Pound's fascism.

from Forward: Life and Afterlife of William Carlos Williams

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