| Sumario: | Critics have long compared William Carlos Williams to Daniel Boone, arguing that both abandoned European models to engage with the American landscape on its own terms. As evidence, scholars typically cite passages from In the American Grain (1925) that appear to praise Boone for his submission to the wilderness. However, Williams offers a subtle critique of westward expansion and of the language used to lionize frontier figures in popular histories. A year later, Williams developed his thinking further in a little-known prose poem that describes Boone as a symbol of the violence inherent to frontier exploration. Read alongside Spring and All (1923), these works reveal the poet's preoccupation with how American history is narrativized. In both prose and verse, Williams questioned national myths by exploring the imagination's ability to sustain, obscure, or critique violent histories.
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