Perception in the Mode of the Word: Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of Perception in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams Review December 1, 2025 Deven Philbrick
Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of perception, which holds that a knower is already entangled with a perceived object before becoming consciously aware of it, offers a fresh way to understand William Carlos Williams's famous line "No ideas but in things." The statement does not prioritize objects over ideas; rather, ideas and things exist in a relationship that is ontologically prior to either. Proprioception—an embodied, non-conscious form of knowledge—becomes key to interpreting Williams's short poems, which dramatize a critique of the subject/object distinction by portraying perception without a perceiver. This framework reveals philosophical complexity in seemingly simple poems.