The Iowa Review
Volume 7
Issue 4 Fall
Article 36
1976
The Poem as a Field of Action: Guerilla Tactics in
"Paterson"
Paul Mariani
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Mariani, Paul. "The Poem as a Field of Action: Guerilla Tactics in "Paterson"." The Iowa Review 7.4 (1976): 94-117. Web.
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as
empty
big dark windows
will line up for you.
that, I was here, and I stopped
in stillness the
Somewhere
lights
came on, for their own
pale being,
too.
for something
you do.
Like
and I listenedwith allmy life
Happy
else, quickly,
the way
in Sunlight / William
Stafford
it's out by Glass Butte some
Maybe
time in late fall, and sage owns the whole
Even the obsidian chips
left by the Indians glitter, out of
their years. Last night's eager stars
are somewhere, back of the
sky.
world.
where you are says, "It's me
matter how still the day,
No
only."
a fence wire hums for whatever
there is,
even if no one is there. And sometimes
Nothing
to succeed that day,
for luck, by neglecting
no one else, and the fence wire
there,
you're
FIELDS
OF
sings.
ACTION
The Poem as a Field of Action: Guerilla Tactics in
Paterson / Paul Mariani
A plan for action to supplant a plan for action:
In those dark days of December,
the German
1940, with
over London,
the
with
fire, T. S. Eliot,
ringing
city
bombing
Stukas dive
from his fire
Previously unpublished material by William Carlos Williams
copyrighted 1976 by
Florence H. Williams. Published by permission of New Directions Publishing Corpora
tion.
94
University of Iowa
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to
The Iowa Review
®
www.jstor.org
Station post on the roof of Faber & Faber's offices on Russell
in that
that scene from Dante's
moment,
hell,
apocalyptic
as well. And so,
moment
After
Had
Square, caught
the Pentecostal
the dark dove with the flickering tongue
passed below the horizon of his homing,
in what would
have seemed a most
he could begin to compose,
inauspic
could sum up a lifetime's concen
ious time, the last of his Four Quartets,
tration on his craft, a logo-centric
craft, words fluttering about the ineffable
in sprung four
not cease from exploration," he concluded,
shall
"We
Logos.
stressed lines, alike and yet so unlike those quatrains he'd done twenty-five
years before,
the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And
in the
at the bombed city blazing
feel he
dark, he might
pre-dawn
Looking
had earned the right to invoke the idea of mystical
union, could now call on
had penned
The
the presences
of that anonymous
English mystic who
time and of Dante, whose
back in Chaucer's
Cloud of Unknowing
para
of
could evoke the whole
disal rose, aflame now on the horizon,
company
in those refining fires. Let the fire
the blessed, purged, now, and cleansed,
streets to fiery destruction.
bombs do their worst,
whole
Here,
consigning
a
was
in
heart that could sing
that pyre, singing that
still,
all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When
the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
final important
poem. And
a
verse
number
of
and
years
though
twenty-five
plays
to write and the Nobel Prize to accept, and though he would
to
continue
even after his death, he
be lionized, to be the darling of the universities
that he had extended
would
the poetic
line
stop with this poem, believing
as far as he felt it
in
be
his
time.
extended
The
ought reasonably
period of
was
it
had
ended
with
the
of Little
over;
experimentation
poetic apotheosis
was too modest
to name the event
"So here I
though he
Gidding,
outright.
This,
the Little
he still had
Gidding,
another
am," the loose Alexandrines
would
be Eliot's
of East Coker
95
lament,
in the middle
way, having had twenty years
the years of l'entre deux guerres?
Twenty years largely wasted,
use words, and every
to
to
learn
Trying
attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
to say it.
One is no longer disposed
in 1947 on the
the British Academy
So, addressing
subject of his revision
ist stance on Milton's
in the direct
there
line of
influence, Eliot,
standing
a
series
his
with
closed
of
in
succession,
elevated,
fact, churchly,
speech
sonorities.1
"We cannot," he intoned, "in literature, any more
than in the
rest of life, live in a perpetual
state of revolution."
Poetry, he reminded his
It should
not
listeners, had not one but two functions.
only to purify
help
the dialect of the tribe, as Mallarm?
had enjoined, but it should also prevent
too
the language
"from changing
of language
rapidly," for "a development
a
at too great a
a
sense
would
be
in
the
of
speed
development
progressive
And that sort of breakdown
deterioration."
and deterioration
of English
a very real threat to the tradition in A.D. 1947. Had not the modern
posed
a new
ists, himself among the leaders, already established
poetic diction for
the young to explore and utilize? Let the young,
turn to Milton
therefore,
to see how a
turn
be
to
let
Milton
them
that
written,
long poem might
they
to
"avoid the danger of a servitude
to
current
and
might
speech
colloquial
the breakdown
of forms, "the pointless
jargon." Beware
irregularity." Mil
son had come to see,
ton's greatness,
this wayward
lay just there, in his ad
to the great tradition of English
herence
verse, in his "departure
from, and
return to, the
to the established
In his adherence
norms,
regular measure."
Milton
had
his
achieved
freedom.
"In
Eliot
short,"
greatest
paradoxically,
summed up, "it now seems to me that poets are
from
liberated
sufficiently
to approach
Milton's
the study of his work without
reputation,
danger, and
with profit to their poetry and to the
And
there Eliot
English
language."
felt he could let the issue rest. The
was
of
period
poetic experimentation
now at an end. It had, as it turned out, coincided
own
with
Eliot's
exactly
of
in
Now
let
the
this
consolidate
years
young,
post-war time,
development.
and employ what
their ghostly masters had indeed achieved
for them.
*#$#aaaa<*a**
the Enola Gay lumbered off its Pacific runway on the morning
of
a
it carried in its womb
Over
the
of
bomb.
Hiro
August 6,1945,
single
city
the bomb-bay
shima (population
doors of this other dark dove
245,000)
to release that single, almost lumpish bomb. What
then
opened
happened
was
ever before
had
that
in
unlike
the
anything
happened
radically
long
When
96
to kill
war. Within
moments
enough energy had been released
history of
was
It
another
and
and
80,000.
80,000 people
poison
seriously burn, break,
the first act of a new kind of war; a new kind of energy had been un
it had been dropped,
but
leashed which
stunned not only those on whom
it as well. Wars
do release energy,
also the very ones who had dropped
William
de
Carlos Williams
knew, and though they release it wastefully,
atom
it. And the very fact of the
bomb,
stag
structively,
they do release
once
came to inform the very core of
in its
gering
grasped,
implications,
to stand as metonym
for the vast open fields of poetry
Williams'
poetics,
which had not yet even been tapped.
who was still searching
No wonder,
for a new mea
then, that Williams,
a new
sure even as Eliot
out against him. In
for
lash
should
spoke
stability,
an essay
in Four Pages in February,
1948?one
of those ephemeral
published
for Williams
which
constituted
"little magazines"
the cutting edge of the
avant
garde and which together made up the incredibly tough flower which
stood?Williams
(in time) break the very rock on which the academies
might
influence Milton's
swung out against Eliot and the pernicious
poetry could
as well ) was
and
Eliot's
still have on the young.2 Milton's
offense
(
capital
to have
in order to adhere to certain orthodoxies
"the language
perverted
to the "old"; both
of classic form." Like Milton,
Eliot
already belonged
were mountains
must
fallen "across the way modern
take to get on
poetry
in
with its work." What was Eliot really up to, after all, Williams
wondered,
an
as
it
Milton"?
Wasn't
earthworks
the
[such]
young against
"throwing
a means,
a means
that he feared they just might
"DISCOVER
for expres
of mood
and style in our day which Mr. Eliot has
sion, an enlargement
never
could still effect a destructive
had, in
influence,
sighted"? Milton
fact "converted" Eliot himself
"over a lifetime." In time Eliot himself had
of the mid-twentieth
become the Milton
century, the singer of his own "en
Some of Milton's
and distant world."
experi
early poetry?the
lightened
mental
Samson Agonistes)?the
here Williams
young
placed
But
Milton
had better be avoided,
be
effect.
the
later
good
difficult work unlike
there was new work to be done, "enormously
a nega
ever conceived,
[or Eliot, he might have added]
anything Milton
tive which his best scarcely envisions."
could
cause
work
use to
From
blurts,
(and
the forties, as he moved by halts,
the late thirties on and throughout
of the major form he'd
false starts towards the realization
and many
the way for, the form of his long poem Pater
spent thirty years preparing
son, Williams'
letters, notes, essays, and lectures are likewise preoccupied
of clearing the field in order to
the question
with one overriding
question:
as he told Horace
to move,
find a new form, the need felt marrow-deep
97
"into the field of action and go into combat there on
where
the
poem as field of action, as battlefield,
ground."3
en
route
formations
the
new,
older,
open
might
still-green
successfully
the sonnet, the blank verse line, the octosylla
trenched forces of orthodoxy:
all drawn up in their imposing
the iambic pentameter,
bic couplet,
col
Gregory
the new
in mid-1944,
The
of all sorts, pro
supported by systems and ideologies
those
stale
linear
shell-like
"The artist,"
forms,
tecting
configurations.
in March,
not as occupying
had written
Williams
1938, "is to be understood
some
section of the field of action but the whole
field, at a dif
outlying
umns,
their
flanks
those
from that possessed
ferent level howbeit
And what
by grosser modes."4
were
those grosser modes? Again and again, Williams
insists, they are any
in the truest sense?which
of those special interest groups?usurious
would
use
own
for
their
interests:
and
and
poetry
special
parties
ideologies
churches of all sorts. Fields of knowledge
of whatever
kind were, by their
factions, offering partial solutions, containing
very nature, parties, divisions,
an
in their very incompleteness?as
seeds of
against
expanding universe?the
their own destruction,
their own shell-like
in the
deaths.
(Shelley)
Only
in
the
which
well-made
its
poem,
poem
adequately
incorporated
expanded
base the fact of a living, sensuous, present-day
to an
(as opposed
reality
or intellectualized
to
the
beat
time,
ideological
poet manage
reality) might
in
that all-consuming
fire, at its own game. "Formal patterns," Williams
is a
into his own poetics,
sorts
sisted in what
"formal
of
all
patterns
key
and
represent arrests of the truth in some particular phase of its mutations,
unless
become
mutilations."5
thereafter,
immediately
they change,
as General Braddock
had learned the hard way when his
Therefore,
just
his
well-ordered
closed formations,
columns, had run smack into an ambush
to the new con
you either adapted
deep inside the New World wilderness,
an
or
ditions by dispersing
random formation,
your forces in
apparently
the un
then, the all-important
dissonance,
your lines went under. Enter,
the settled periodic maps,
enter Pan, that un
stable element
disturbing
so that the
once
factor into the orthodoxy,
stable, unrhyming
phoenix might
more rise out of the destruction,
the decreation,
of the old nest, plastered
together from all those old bits of form.
came to harp on the need for a new Une, a new measure,
Williams
until
him
At
least
twenties
he was sure his audiences
obsessed.
from
the
thought
later became
the em
on, the insistence on the need for new forms, for what
on the variable foot, is
inWilliams'
poetry and criticism.
everywhere
phasis
a
so much
so
to
It threatened
become
omnipresent,
polyvalent,
stridency,
came
near
to apologizing
in time very
for bringing
that Williams
the issue
said that, he would
to ex
up this one more time, and then, having
proceed
now with
on the need again.
back
the
of
Looking
hindsight
pound
thirty
98
it was that Williams
become more readily noticeable what
even now far from won).
is
In
and
the
battle
rejecting,
why
(though
at
notes
of Wash
his
for the series of lectures he delivered
the University
in his
in
in
and
included
1948,
part
ington
subsequently
published
July,
Selected Essays under the title, "The Poem as a Field of Action," Williams
in the
to articulate his own sense of how the poem might develop
struggled
years,
was
it should
next
twenty to thirty years.
odd
the very time he began taking notes for that series of talks?on
in
he
and
random
that
notebook
of
scraps
paper
pages
prescription
kept
in February
from an operation
of 1948
by his bedside while
recuperating
was
a few
at Atlantic
and later while
City with Floss for
days?Williams
II
also smack in the middle
of organizing Paterson III and still had Paterson
new
measure
out of the
fresh in his memory.6 The actual working
in the only
it
concomitant
itself?was
with
mattered,
poem
place
nearly
finally?the
the attempt to articulate
No sooner
the very need for that new measure.
come in from
had Williams
the field than he would
try to say
exploring
it was, exactly, he had found out there. And he had found, in the
what
little magazines,
out there in those same
the young and the near-young
even
in their own poems
and
then
fields, listening carefully,
demonstrating
summer of '48:
was
in
the truth of what Williams
like
the
poets
saying
even
Louis
and
Charles
and
Roethke
and
Theodore
Olson,
Zukofsky7
and Denise
Levertov
like Robert Creeley
and Allen Gins
younger poets
At
berg and countless others.
two traditions, one
told his audience,
There were, Williams
representing
in
the
viable
other?the
stability,
tradition?representing
change. Change
to
avoid
the forms of the poem, Williams
said, was absolutely
necessary
a marmoreal
in the
stasis, stagnation,
fixity.8 And, in fact, the best poems
was
it
that
form
when
the
had
tradition
only
proved
poetic
sufficiently
that it could truly be said to have entered
from its predecessors
changed
as he had been at some
that tradition. By change, however,
pains to point
a struc
in late 1946, he meant
out in his "Letter to an Australian
Editor"
tural change in the poem arising out of a deep understanding
of one's so
as
not the
the language
female,
fructifying
really used?and
ciety?that
son
of
off
forms
habit
the
the
of
the
father
without
feeding
andxogenetic
in the matrix of the
recourse to the changes
itself.
living, pulsing
language
were
had
and
most
done?and
What Pound
Eliot
they
simply the
important
to go running off to Europe,
to a
where
culture,
examples?was
ready-made
in tapeworm
off the figures of the great tradition,
feed
fashion,
could,
they
into their own idiom. The effect,
the dead masters
in effect "translating"
as "the fixed basis of their
however, was to use those masters
divagations,"
ever
clear of them. What
their sources without
resulted
altering
breaking
99
was
a stasis,
a
the idiom from coming over un
blockage, which prevented
or falseness. That block
constriction
without
unfettered,
hampered,
literary
con
into a sort of wax
turned the language
age created an artificiality,
a
tainer
in
smothered
language
honey.
housing
Recall
felt
just how beset by the forces of the "great tradition" Williams
in the mid-forties,
a
what
he
the
termed
start, he
(For
by
"party-line" boys.
recent Anthology
have tossed the Partisan Review,
Conrad Aiken's
would
had failed to include him?and
those two Anglo
of American
Poetry?which
now
and
the
first
Eliot
into that stew.)
Catholics,
young upstart Auden
ever
so
to
And recall, too,
shift the force of the field
metaphor
slightly,
a
new
that
field must first be cleared and
before
furrows, new lines made,
there can be new growth and new flowers.
the central importance
(Hence
in
in
of Poe's example
the
field
Williams'
essay on Poe in In the
clearing
to
American
the essay with which Williams
had originally wanted
Grain,
in
close his book. ) In the mid-forties,
it was the example of Auden
particu
lar which Williams
held up for examination
and for rejection.9
really,
Why,
come to the United
had Auden
asked. Because,
he felt,
States, Williams
to realize that he was
in
"breathless"
rapidly becoming
come to the end of his
so
and
had
England,
already
poetic resources,
been drawn to America hoping he could find a new, more flexible measure.
as he liked about the
Let Auden write as much
industrial
impoverished
or write
con
all
the
occasional
wanted
unless
he
pieces
landscape
they
and flexible
tained an expanded
structure, they were lifeless. And yet Auden
to see that the
was perceptive
in England
too
had become
enough
language
so that it was no
too stable to admit of real experimentation,
rigidified,
to contain a significant part of his own world and his own real
longer able
for
all their expatriation
And
attempts, both Eliot and Pound had un
ity.
Auden
had
come
had
with
them the seeds of the American
That
language.
as
an
be
But
embarrassment.
constricted,
rejected,
spurned
language might
this
it was this very unstable
dialect
of
the
lan
element,
phase
English
a
save
to
into
it
in
had
entered
their
which
that
Auden's
guage,
poetry
way
best work, try as he might, could not match.
of Williams'
But there were other contemporaries
who had also failed to
means.
was
formal
If the poem
"a construction
adequate
develop
embody
con
then Hart Crane?that
the
other American
the
of
moment,"
ing
reality
lines did "not disturb
the bed of the
also failed. For Crane's
tender?had
the blank verse line,
form": only his surfaces were new. He had cultivated
this poet, who, cruising the bars in the Red Hook district of Brooklyn
look
to give his name out as Kit Marlowe,
used
for
and
that
ing
companionship,
a stable
his staple. He had chosen,
rather to cultivate
line had become
sonorities with
their "heady metaphors,"
field, those elaborate Elizabethan
on the old
had chosen rather to plaster new lexical configurations
English
avoidably
carried
100
forms. There
new
was, Williams
insisted,
"no new
structure"
in the man,
"no
bones."
had remarked back in
trouble with Stevens, Williams
to say
he used the blank verse line, he felt compelled
on in his talk, "An
to the Poem,"
Approach
important.10 Early
something
in mid-July,
1947 and given again at
at the Kenyon Conference
delivered
that September, Williams
held at Columbia
Institute meetings
the English
Stevens' lecture which had been read before a Har
spoke of his having read
in The
and subsequently
the previous February
vard gathering
published
saw
Aca
"Three
entitled
the
Williams
Partisan Review
it):
(where
piece
own poetics was in sharp
his
that
the
fact
demic Pieces." Without
stressing
in effect rejected Stevens' con
to his old friend's, Williams
contradistinction
structure of reality resided in the accuracy of the re
tention that the modern
and metaphoric
between
semblances
things, ideas, facts, and their lexical
was at the core of the poetic act. For Stevens,
the
that metaphor
referents:
re
for
in
in
the
desire
that
the
fact
rested
of
"satisfying
poetry
singularity
sense
sense
of
it
the
of
it
enhances
touches
the
semblance
reality,
reality,
it."11 The essay is not one of Stevens' better efforts,
it, intensifies
heightens
and a comment he had made a few months
earlier, when he was preparing
sense
Stevens
how
of just
his talk, reinforces the
great the distance between
on
in
In
form
the question of
had become
and Williams
December,
poetry.
a friend that he had not read Paterson
I because
1946, Stevens had written
man
was
in reading Williams
that the
there was "the constant difficulty"
to
in
has
in the way of saying things than
what he
"more interested
say."
a
in what
interested
insisted, people were
But, Stevens
"fundamentally
to the way
writer has to say. When we are sure of that, we pay attention
in which he says it, not often before"
So, first there was
(italics added).12
ar
the paraphrasable
content, and then there was the form. But, Williams
was "made up of nothing else" than a new real
gued in his talk, the poem
it had arisen, and only
occasion out of which
the
ity superseding
particular
as that was made manifest
the
of
the
form
poem. The reality lay just
by
in the precise
form of the utterance,
there, then, in the particular
shape in
which the words jostled along the line.
a host of other
failed to suffici
If these figures?and
poets besides?had
a
was
structure
of inno
there
tradition
of
the
still
the
poem,
ently engage
was a tradition which had tried, how
It
vation in modern American
poetry.
a new structure which
ever
to achieve a radically new measure,
haltingly,
it
to the complex reality of the living language
could respond adequately
to begin with,
of Walt
there was,
the example
self. For the Americans
the
the "cry of a man breaking
"formal excursions,"
Whitman's
through
barriers of constraint IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO SAY exactly what was
his major
in his mind."13 His greatest contribution?that
which
constituted
And Stevens. The
1937, was that, when
101
to the
to be a
of American
proven
development
poetry?had
one:
but nevertheless
"the break he instituted with
negative
all-important
traditional
forms." What Whitman
had done in effect was to break down
the complex
associations
of the old forms to their "nascent elements"
for
into new forms "as the opportunities
future poets to recombine
of a new
a free verse
like "Song of Myself"
language offer."14 Was
something
poem?
the poem lay there on the page in its "free"
Yes, and yet, no. Yes, because
verse form. But, in a
if one could only look deep
deeper sense, no, because
one
see that there
was no
into
the
elements
of
the
would
line,
enough
really
a
some sort. Free
such thing as free verse without
of
governing
principle
verse poems were, in fact,
contribution
of measure
have not been
not been
or
have
they
applied. They are,
applicable
a new association
in
the
of
elements
the
represent...
prosodie
making
for final assess
elements waiting
(or might be so) or of unrecognized
poems
found
to which
the ordinary
or to which
standards
ment.15
since Whitman
had shown two distinc
poetry
history of American
trends: a regression back to the older, safer rules of English
prosody
we
or
add Bloom
(and in our own moment
poetry via Saintsbury
might
a
an
or
venture
often "bizarre and puzzling,"
Davie),
irregular advance,
out into the unchartered
all
about us, after a new measure,
those
reality
new forms made
most basic element of the poem:
the
the
by recombining
foot itself.
in the search to
There already existed a tradition of innovation
expand
for example, Hopkins'
the resources of the poetic foot. There were,
poems
on the stress
their all-important
in sprung rhythm, with
emphasis
quality
of the language.16 And there was Robert Bridges, both in such early pieces
as "The Dead
their modified
and "London
Child"
Snow," with
sprung
music
of
The
Testament
in
and
the
later
of Beauty.17
sprung
syllabic base,
These were the important early English
innovators,
though, of course, there
master
Ezra Pound, Williams'
was the
of
early
complex?case
special?and
a
as
for
Williams
Pound's
and amiable antagonist.
poet
importance
greatest
rested in the work he had done with the line. "Time," he wrote of Pound in
in
success." It was a quality
of Pound's
January, 1950, "is the pure element
to time"?which
"makes most other contem
his lines?this
"joining phrases
It was not with the ideogram
porary verse sound juvenile by comparison."18
or with his ideas on the cancer of usury, a cancer which
had even eaten
in the field of the poem, then, that Pound
into the lines of those working
was
In fact, Williams
afraid that
had made
his greatest
contributions.
had blocked
the
ideas (until the Pisan Cantos were published)
Pound's
so that his
of
thirties
and
for
the
line"
(the poetry
early
poetry,
"present
The
tive
102
de
become
the same or positively
"repetitious,
tiresomely
a
was to
same
content
into
All
kinds
Pound
had
done
of
the
put
cayed."19
form he had created between
1915 and 1925. He was the androgyne
par
had said a quarter of a century
and in that sense, as Williams
excellence
still the one
earlier, the "best enemy" American
poetry had. And he was
man from whom Williams
to refine his own craft.20 But in
could continue
re
was
the mid-forties,
Williams
troubled by Pound's
apparent
primarily
on
means
the idea, on
and his continued
reliance
jection of the technical
the relatively unimportant
content.21
had
ties)
over the fields of his
eval
contemporaries,
and
the
deficiencies,
uating
strategic entrenchments,
strengths
in the
break in their defenses:
and that unguarded
the critical weakness
as a cancer, undetected,
so
was
line itself. That weakness
acting
ignored,
en
structures
basic
had
of
their
become
that, unawares, many
grids, cages,
trapping rather than freeing that elusive beauty: Kore, the radiant gist, the
field tactics could Williams
goddess herself. What
point to, how expand
atom
the field of action to include an expanding
reality? One thing the
bomb had done: it had shown what could be done, what might be done, if
So Williams
had again
looked
their relative
the
of the Une itself could be
the structural valence
disturbing
was
then utilized. Most
contemporary
poetry
being brought
stillborn into the world because
the line itself, which
had once contained
the passage
of time
life, had become
rigid, had moved with
increasingly
towards the stability of inert lead.
irritant
charted
and
The problem
lay, then, in the elements which made up the Une itself and
was where
the stasis lay, in
finally in the concept of the foot itself. That
as that. To continue
as
on in the old iambic
to
write
something
elementary
was to write
its accentual-syllabic
in a leaded
with
pentameter,
guidelines,
it was that was
form. Smash the foot, determine what
the peri
disturbing
consonant with our own sense of time,
odic table, find a new measurement
and the effect in terms of a released energy could be as
for
revolutionary
as the bomb had been for destruction.22
EUot
and
Crane
and
Stevens
good
and a multitude
of others had for too long played at conventional
warfare.
and as regulated as the old, but more in
New, revised tactics, as disciplined
line with the modern world:
that was what was needed! That, and that
we dreamt on
into
raise our own moment
alone, would
reality; otherwise
our
our
our
on
time
into
ob?vion.
alone,
world,
people,
slumbering
am
All well and good. But there were difficulties.
"Maybe I
dreaming,"
to himself,
Williams
had confessed
I
is
conceive
I
"maybe what
impossible.
so far in mak
for I do not seem to have succeeded
may be excusing myself,
ing studies of what I think can be done. I write about it in all my so-called
103
some
tests. I
but I have not, in my own work, made
practical
on
want
to
I
he
which
isn't
what
do."23
And
when
yet,
just go
writing,
was
on
wrote
in
he
the
brink
of
the
"Descent"
this,
January, 1947,
writing
va
into the energy flow
and of tapping
the metrical
passage
disturbing
criticism,
still be several years before he realized what he had
(though it would
In the meantime,
in fact achieved).
there were possibilities
which he could
as
as
to
to
for.
avoid
well
look
articulate:
things
things
He saw, for example, that the trouble with English poetry from Chaucer's
time on (he did not know Anglo-Saxon
poetry well enough to feel free to
on it, but he was fond of Chaucer,
comment
and
the Troilus
especially
con
was that it was a rhyme-poor
had
that
and
poets
Criseyde)
language,
it conform to the endurable
Umits of
their syntax to make
tinually distorted
never
Wil
had
much
the old metrical
troubled
patterns. Rhyme patterns
liams once he was thirty; he had simply dropped
the device, except for oc
casional effects, soon after his first, privately printed volume, Poems
(1909).
And he learned early on that a good modern
poet could not invert the
in
poetry. And yet, how many poets,
phrase and still write good modern
order "to gain wit [and] fluidity," had "perverted
the prose construction"?
and then the
The meter
could only be twisted,
forced, strained so much,
or go dead."24
was
to
"invert
the
forced
poet
phrase
the
But the so-called free verse was not the answer, for without
discipline
a
not
off
but
bad
Who
line simply went
into,
slack, sputtered
prose,
poem.
did the contemporary
of the craft think they were, WilUams
practitioners
to assume that they could "do what
of the
the greatest
warned,
geniuses
can do, with
new
WITHOUT
devices
and
freshness,
language
originality,
lence
or
structures."25
A
new
measure,
a new
government
of
the
words,
a
new
that was what was
open formation:
a
sensual reality, become
become
then, what could he point
Well,
could he offer young poets in 1948?
if the poem were once again to
needed
a fit abode for the muse.26
again
to? What
of this new measure
examples
As for actual evidence of the new work,
to search for it as he had: in all those Uttle magazines
people would have
as it was, was
ac
For good work,
tentative
and in the anthologies.
being
own
to
American
the
them
their
He
could
idiom,
urge
study
compUshed.
from the solid Eng
the dialect phase, the green shoot stemming
language,
lish trunk, study it as he had, by listening to the rhythms of the language as
or
one found
it got itself spoken daily in the streets of whatever
polis
place
to listen hard for the pace of the
oneself in. He could urge them especially
its breaks, its
its
its "acceptable
pauses and interludes,"
language,
phrasing,
its very life.27 He could urge them further to attend
its breath,
heaves,
to speed values in their Unes, to try to trace across the page "the
carefully
mere
rather than to plod on with metrically
"cor
of a meaning"
brushing
104
to any
could not hold the elusive Ufe necessary
good poem.
were
could urge them too to utiUze those loose, colloquial
phrases that
a
in the very grain of the
certain
and
the
which
line
gave
spoken language
a sense, as he
freedom of manner,
drive and reality."
put it, "of emotional
an intense care for a
An idiomatic freshness
struc
with
coupled
syntactic
on the other hand, should be
ture which,
even
with
meaning,
packed tight
if that were expressed
all
with
the
and
of
elUptically,
disjunctures
leaps
as
one
a
was
the mind
for
had
done.
There
Williams
itself,
Joyce
poetics
could subscribe to. For it was words and
that could unlock the
only words
as free as
of their old associa
of words,
mind, new combinations
possible
new
new in their measure,
to the consciousness,
tional weights,
words
to
moment.
radiant tracings of the ever-fleeting
That was how one began
create a new force-field,
a new field of action.
rect" lines which
He
was
in
of what WilUams
And that is something
saying about the poem
was
War
World
But
half
II.
that
the
the years immediately
following
only
of it, for was not the real proof only in the poem itself, the well-made
poem?
is
I can say concerning
the poem
"The most
inevitably
only second best
at
had warned
his Washington
the poem itself," Williams
audience
beside
the outset of his talks. "This is a permanent
and irreversible
quaUfication.
it impUes that takes the cake.
It is the poem, the new poem, the invention
Never forget that. The achieved poem needs no bush of argument any more
than did good wine in the old days." (PFA)Which suggests that itwould be
to look at Paterson as well as at some of the shorter pieces Wil
profitable
at about the same time he was
liams was writing
his "so-called
formulating
was
his college
for
criticism." When Williams
criticism, especially
writing
to
not
himself
felt
the
need
make
he
audiences,
revolutionary's
only widely
But in the act of enunciating
understood
but also widely
what
accepted.
was that he was
in
new
it
this unexplored
world, what
charting
exactly
two things: a sense of enthusiasm
often came across were
often bordering
on the urgent, and a Cassandra-like
to say
frustration
about being unable
was he was
it
what
clearly
actually seeing.
is a different
But in his poems, Williams
kind of person. There the hesi
in Paterson,
tancies and the false steps and the frequent descents
for ex
are in fact all part of a brilliant
as WilUams
tactic
guerilla
ample,
brings
the city into alignment with himself. He is the patient
strategist, mapping
out his Unes, shifting his metrical
like Washington
emphases,
retreating,
over New York (Williams' own
across
Island
and
until he
metaphor)
Long
can take the field
storm in New Jersey. Consider,
for
by
example, how Wil
in
liams says "Raindrops on a Briar," a poem first published
early 1947:
105
I, a writer,
at one time
hipped
did not consider
on
painting,
the effects, painting,
for that reason, static, on
the contrary the stillness of
the objects?the
flowers, the gloves
freed them precisely by that
to move
from a necessity merely
in space as if they had been?
not children! but the
thinking male
or the
and
deUver
charged
ing female frantic with ecstasies;
rather to present, for me,
a
pregnant motion;
series of varying leaves
us say, to
clinging still, let
served
a more
the cat-briar
after last night's
its
storm,
waterdrops
stems
ranged upon the arching
irregularly
as
an
accompaniment.
(Collected
Later
Poems,
p. 99)
has given us is both an action poem and, affectively,
the
a poem. Consider
the
effects
of
the
such
the
behind
double
phrasing,
poetics
caesure in the first and last Unes of the initial stanza, the varied pace, the
forward and the counterpressure
of the
effect of the syntax as it pushes
as it at
its various asides and qualifiers
voice slowing the Une down with
sure that the reader understands
that it is painting
he is
tempts to make
What
Williams
it is writing
he is actually performing).
Consider
(though
as "for that reason," "on the
interpolations
contrary," "pre
us
the compression
of
say." Consider
cisely," "merely," "for me," and "let
an
to
in
of
how
he gives us,
words
the lexical package
un-still Ufe,
paint
first negatively
("not children" and not simply the male or the female as
not the stillness of
and certainly
pects of the reality under consideration
us a
and then positively
"still" Ufe
the situation),
giving
dynamic,
unquiet
to
still"
and irregular waterdrops
the
the unsteady
"arch
where
"clinging
are
those
stems
active
how
that
(how
present participles,
ing"
shimmering
us
of
to
illusion
still
the
of
the
Ufe
the
freshness,
stillness)
give
clinging
talking about
such idiomatic
106
as
we were
to the effects of
still witnessing
ephemeral moment,
though
"last night's/storm."
That moment,
that image and the voice speaking
the
a
a
a
over
ac
words create
violent
field of action,
stillness
which
dynamic
are
has
where
the
effects
still
tivity
present.
passed,
as it does in its very
But what of the larger field, of Paterson, embodying
a
for
often
search
viable
form. Think back
WilUams'
pages
long,
frustrating
as
as
to the
to
far
"The Wanderer"
back
poems
early attempts,
stretching
the
the
aborted
various
the '20s and
sketches,
(1914),
plans throughout
in
Pound
1936
about
that
Williams'
'30s,
telUng
"magnum opus
projected
a form
to do," the long sounding out,
I've always wanted
"working toward
into the writing
of some sort."28 In the spring of '42 he plunges
of what he
thinks of as a relatively
short long poem, and begins amassing page after
as he tries out one
after another. And
page of an introduction,
approach
even with
on the one hand and of Marcia
of David
the presence
Lyle
cannot
Nardi on the other?his Noah Faitoute
Paterson, his Cress?WilUams
sense of constriction
into a
break through an overwhelming
satisfying form.
that the poem
In January, 1943, he is telling his pubUsher, James LaughUn,
is "crying to be written" as an answer to "the kind of thought that destroyed
it has made
of Eliot," an answer which will allow
Pound and made what
of that year he is telling
the city.29 In August
a
"an account,
of
McAlmon
that he is writing
panorama
psychologic-social
man Paterson," but that
a
as if it were a man,
the
he
treated
city
though
it
has already "done a hundred pages or so," he is still finding
extremely
in
to work at his poem.30 Again,
difficult
early 1944, he tells Charles Ab
that he has been trying
bott, curator of the Poetry Room at the Lockwood,
is
to
that
he
he cannot find the
blocked
because
himself
forward,
push
can
see his way clear.
now
thinks
he
he
into
the
poem, though
right way
is
he
The long "Introduction"
already amassed,
hoping LaughUn will pub
not be).31 And in July, he writes Horace
it
will
lish separately
(though
in West Haven,
that he is
from his vacation
Connecticut,
cottage
Gregory
a whole
into
final
Uke
of
the
draft
of his
sheaf
papers
something
"aligning"
a
two
to
Stevens
Wallace
weeks
he
later.32
fact
"Introduction,"
repeats
the local culture
to infiltrate
that No
of his poems in The Wedge
(1944) to Marianne Moore
Speaking
form or no form
vember he admits that there "is too often no convincing
or
to hold me over or take me over to some
promising
enough
convincing
more
satisfying invention."33
sense of failure
And then, on New Year's, 1945, he confesses his profound
to Horace Gregory:
to get to the "Paterson" poem again and as
this fall I have wanted
about it. I see
before I always find a dozen reasons for doing nothing
I shy away
I have collected
and that is enough,
the mass of material
All
107
else. ... I am timid about beginning what I know
something
me if I
to become
exhaust
involved.
permit myself
surely
Just yes
one of the causes of my
I
to
I MUST
learned
terday
inabiUty
proceed:
is
BEGIN COMPOSING
and I
old
outdated,
again_The
approach
new again. But there is
shall have to work Uke a fiend to make myself
or I am done.34
no escape. Either I remake
myself
and write
will
and Wil
has been dynamited,
the blockage
however,
By early February,
that his friend Kitty Hoagland
Uams can write Gregory
has already typed
out "the first finished draft of the 1st quarter of the 'Paterson' thing,"35 at
to send his "con
the same time that he is already asking LaughUn where
to the meal of the gods," though it may prove to be Uttle more
tribution
I has been fin
than "perhaps a radish," once this early draft of Paterson
before
St.
Patrick's
ished ("sometime
Day").36 By early 1945, then, WilUams
a
a
has achieved
of variations, will be
major form which, with
plenitude
rest of the poem.
the
repeated throughout
I with that
the typographical
And yet, if one compares
layout of Paterson
recourse
to the content of each, as
them without
of Paterson
II, compares
examine a fish, one will note that there are distinctive
and
Fabre might
even radical Une differences
between
the two. Most of the verse sections of
in lines varying from the
I are in columns,
Paterson
epic-Uke opening,
Paterson Ues in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back ...
to the shorter
lines of a passage
We
Uke
sit and talk and the
speaks of the giants
have died in the past and have
returned to those scenes unsatisfied
silence
who
to the terse quatrains
...
of
Who
is younger
than I?
The
contemptible
twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom
But with
uary,
Williams
Paterson
1947,
Unes
begins
the
dirt.
...
in earnest
in Jan
II, which WilUams
began
apparently
as
and parts of lines are spread out across the page,
to Uterally split up his poem into its constituent
elements.
108
in search of the radiant gist he believed
if he could only
he could discover
name the element that was
in the sec
metrical
tables.
Here
the
disturbing
that sleeping giant of a man/city,
ond book of his long poem, Paterson,
be
now
in
to
the
whole
and
it
is
stir
from
the
the
dream
of
very
gins
poem,37
lines of the poem itself that the giant is able to come into at least momen
it is
in
tary contact with reaUty, since, most profoundly,
only
learning how
can
a
we
come
to
to measure
know
truly
place.
correctly that
II the characteristic
So it is that in Paterson
signature of the man/city
as Paterson
now to walk
across the
becomes walking,
begins
concretely
a
re
Garrett
her
into
concomitant
Mountain,
female,
stroking
charged
as
in
out
is
of
foot
It
this
Paterson
from
foot
be
sponse.
measuring
moving
as the others, but then,
same traveled
footpaths
gins the ascent, first up the
on
across
the
field
his
that
off
the poet's thoughts
own,
soon, cutting
open
we
to
action.
Garrett
into
in fact
flame
Mountain,
reaUze, becomes
begin
a
as
woman
into
into
caressed
the necessary
the male
life,
field,
charged
over her.
to instruct his thoughts
the
principle begins
concretely
Leaving
Paterson
recalls how those old singers
beaten path, the old line (tradition),
on the mountain
had nearly killed someone else for trying to
expel them
enters
his
and
from
Dalzell
then
force
the old
(the
by
episode),
garden,
field with its "old furrows, to say labor sweated or / had sweated here. / a
flame / spent." These,
then, are the old furrows, old Unes, old measures
Paterson has come upon, breaking down once more to their original form
lessness. But just there, arising out of this scene of apparent
formlessness,
as the
in his
here at this decreative
poet half stumbles
juncture,
halting
a
measure,
there, "before his feet, half tripping, / picking
way,"
suddenly
in flight,
there is "a flight of empurpled wings":
the imagina
grasshoppers
tion itself aflame. From the imagination,
from the very "core [Kore] of his
a red basalt
mind," out of the decreated,
mound,
emerges
"disintegrating"
stone (the female)
to
"instructed
bear away
the
/
grasshopper,
shaped,
some rumor / of the
that
has
it."
/
living presence
preceded
of the old forms, then, the emergence
Out of the breakdown
of the new,
in that unpromising
Paterson
the still-Uving. There, Uterally,
has dis
field,
a field of incessant
where
covered
words,
activity,
stones?heavy
things
their "counter buoyancy
/ by the mind's wings." As the
across
half
in his
the
"walks"
poet
page/field
stumbUng
halting measures,
a new measure.
he is paradoxically
the grasshoppers
creating
Watching
as
act
into
themselves
transforming
they whiz and blur forward in irregular
recalls that stone grasshopper,
that stone stroked by the
patterns, Paterson
are stroked into life
inert
chisel
words
(as
imagina
phallic
by the phallic
comes
to
in
realize
and
that
and
the
fact his own sense of
tion)
poem,
themselves?find
identity,
must
be created
foot by foot,
step by
109
step,
in
halting
measure:
Before
his feet, at each step, the fUght
A burst of wings, a quick
is renewed.
churring
sound.
..
.
in this most unpromising
this abandoned
of places,
field,
Truly, then, here
an annunciation,
as these
has witnessed
Paterson
grasshopper/seraphim,
these "couriers to the ceremonial
of love," announce
by the very presence
a
new
for Paterson.
of their activity, a new poetic
life,
inspiration
There are, of course, the forces of authority which would
strike out at
this new field of energy, as it tries to push itself up
this elusive beauty,
over the "cellar win
lines, the metrical
through the old imprisoning
grid
in
it is
the cellar that Paterson will discover Kore/
dow" (and remember,
but
the
beautiful
Persephone,
thing, misused,
raped
repeatedly,
lying
the thighs). Like Kore, the
there on those stained sheets, fertile between
a
II is another of those female
elusive mink of Paterson
images creating
a
in
atomic
the
the
disturbance
table,
dissonance,
(water)
periodic
grid,
the Church)
and the forces of stasis (the status quo: the academy,
though
to kill that beauty, cannot.38
they try
to walk,
Book II, Paterson will continue
Throughout
stroking the rock
or later, de
him. And there, whether
the mountain,
beneath
ascending
encounter
forces of repression:
the various
he will
the Eliot
scending,
out the "new-washed
ColUe bitch," until the lines lie
like figure combing
in white
stroked on the British pedigree,
"like ripples
sand," a tame design
establishment
who will
later to look
the figure of the English
reappear
Klaus Ehrens, who is, like WilUams
him
down on the haranguing minister,
self, the figure of the Protestant protesting. Or the shadow of Lambert's Cas
a reminder of another
the mountain,
tle, its phallic tower dominating
( eco
the
Uke
Alex
form
of
nomic)
immigrant who,
repression,
recalling
English
of people as some "great beast"
before him, saw the masses
ander Hamilton
to be exploited, maimed,
lan
crying out in their great crippled
crippled,
one
woman
over
And
becomes
with
field
the
the
herself, Cress,
very
guage.
walks, crying out for the poet who will marry
the poem itself, but who
instead all but pulls the poet
neuroses dominate
at
field
the
close of the second book.
the
which
create
Paterson
her and thus
as her
under
that the poet "will continue
knows and knows deeply
yet WilUams
to society continue
his
if
attachments
If a man
adequate.
only
produce
in his fatuous dreams cuts himself off from that supplying
female, he dries
in May,
among these working
up his sources."39 So here, on this Sunday
of that city from
from the mills and factories
class famiUes and couples
his
the poet draws his sustenance,
which
indeed,
very identity, Paterson/
And
to
has come to be fed, to translate that falUng, tumb?ng,
Williams
cascading
roar
about him into the measured
poem: "I bought a new bath
everywhere
110
a brassier," and "Come on! Wassa ma'? You
got /
ing suit, just / pants and
. . .What
a bunch of bums! Afraid
see /
broken
you? /
somebody
leg?
But also, the "featureless" harangue
Blah! / Excrementil"
of the minister
on Garrett Mountain
near some stone benches,
his
outdoors
preaching
words "arrested in space":
Don't think
about me. Call me a stupid old man, that's
me an old bore who talks until
right. Yes, call
he is hoarse when nobody wants to listen. That's
the truth. I'm an old fool and I know it.
there is the poet's own voice, arising out of the same
into
cadences,
place, arising
newly measured
falUng and yet
triple-plied,
a new ascent:
a descent countered
by
buoyant,
And
of course
The descent
beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory
is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation,
since the spaces
it opens
are new
places....
that he will not at once realize its full po
It is a Une so new for WilUams
see for several years yet that he has
as
new
a
not
will
tential
measure,
measure
that he will call upon
created a slower, more meditative
in his
his
when
nervous,
sickness,
characteristically
sharp, body
rhythms will
pace more slowly.40
But Paterson's voice here in Book II is more usually a falter, as the Unes
break up to make their own frequent descents. How often that voice must
as when
stasis of an unchartered
confront
the petrifying
it la
language,
ments:
The
language
style! whose
words
(there are none)
about
whom
dangUng,
its strands encasing them
the water weaves
in a sort of thick lacquer, lodged
under its flow
without
or
scholars
111
to become
the field itself threatens
di
lead-bound,
blocked,
an
roar!"
from the supplying
female, to become
"unmoving
Only by
of his moods
"down the pinnacles
/ fearlessly?
/ to the bases;
breaking
as
base! to the screaming
dregs," only in that terrifying descent
leading,
can the poet
well knew, to wisdom
but also to despair,
WilUams
hope to
in the structure of the
in the inner struc
win through, finding
language,
ture of the elemental
of interest."
foot itself, "something
that Paterson
Name
finds of interest in
it, name that elusive something
And
then
vorced
that conclude?except
for the fragmentary
refrain and
the three quatrains
into the poem and drowning
of Cress whiplashing
then the long complaint
out Paterson himself. Name
the measure
of lines like these, where
anapests
give way
to
spondees:
this most voluptuous
night of the year
the term of the moon is yellow with no Ught
the air's soft, the night bird has
one note, the
in bloom
only
cherry tree
On
its
makes a blur on the woods,
perfume
no more than half
moves
in the mind,
guessed
where
measure
a loose,
triple
seems
to hover
over the lines:
On this
most
voluptuous
night
of the year
the term of the moon
is yellow
with no Ught
the air s
soft
the night bird has
only
one
note
the cherry
tree in bloom....
in the caesura that Paterson hears, breaking
the Unes into
or
to
Hard
is
it
WilUams
else?
himself
it,
triads,
put
something
answer. His own critical
seem to have had a readily articulated
on the poem as a field of action, its energy released and realized
Is it the variations
irregular
does not
comments
are
a new, more flexible measure,
all over the
scattered
maddeningly
by
their
dismembered
earth. And yet, when brought together,
corpse will yield
112
if not an answer. And what we are finally given is
up a unified
sensibility
the sense of a man coming down hard again and again on the work he has
never
that deeper mind which
sleeps and which
already achieved with
not even if that clarification
cannot wait for the critical clarification,
should
come from the poet himself.
eventually
was
In the very weeks
that Williams
typing out his first drafts of Pater
son II,
in
his old friend Kenneth
the "Descent" passage,
Burke,
including
a
one of those
Aristotelian
gestures of his, sent Williams
characteristically
in writing
I was, of
Paterson
the Aeneid.
long summary of Vergil's
"plan"
but perhaps Williams
consider planning
course, already pubUshed,
might
out the remaining books of his long poem, and thus reinforce
its sense of a
as he believed
too
in
But
his heart of
Burke
form.
Williams
knew,
major
such
hearts knew, that Vergil had never "formulated
any
preliminary
plan
as this before
on the Aeneid." No, the critic, he in
composition
beginning
after. "For if the poet allows himself to fall into that trap
too
he will inevitably be of little use
(of Ustening
early to the philosopher)
as
a
to the very
field of investigation
himself
after he, as a
philosopher
his maneuvers."
of course, took place
And maneuvers,
poet, has completed
on fields of intense action across which
must move,
the poet/tactician
new terri
"nascent
his
instincts"
"into
while
haltingly,
probed
stumblingly,
Einstein
other
of
Even
with
fields
had ac
action,
himself, working
tory."
a
of
of
this
mode
the
strategy. Bet
primary
importance
priori
knowledged
sisted, must
come
ter to
into the jungle,
separately
keep poet and critic separate, "to penetrate
as we can to
forth
back
and
each by his own modes,
calling
keep in touch
for better uniting our forces."41
There was, then, talk about the poem as a field of action and the poetic
at different points did act as critic, but it was
field of action itself. Williams
those heated
after
fact
after
he had already made
the
itself,
forays
usually
of his into the virgin territory of the spoken language. And when he emerged,
his own attempts are better than any critic's in his own
try as he might?and
it was he'd
could only stumble by fits and starts to say where
lifetime?he
over and over
in
been and what he'd seen, pointing
the
again
general direc
tion of those fields where
all the action was still swarming.
NOTES
1Milton II, collected in On
Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), pp.
165-183.
113
2 "With
Forced
Four
Rude,"
Fingers
Galveston,
Pages,
No.
Texas,
2
1948),
(Feb.
1-4.
3 The Selected Letters
ofWilliam Carlos Williams,
ed. John C. Thirlwall
cited as SL.
McDowell,
1957),
p. 227. Hereafter
Obolensky,
4
A
the Weather:
of
the
collected
Artist,"
Study
"Against
William
Carlos Williams
York:
New
Directions,
(New
1954),
as SE. When
Olson
hereafter
cited
Charles
read
this essay,
jokingly that he had stolen heavily
in the William
[1939],
lection
at Yale.
ideas
and
6 The
This
of
Essays
collection
Williams
half
5
letter, dated December
in the American
of manuscripts
Col
to
in 1950, would
bear
appear
published
as the central
in
influence
acted
shaping
emphases.
of
for
papers
working
the Lockwood
Zukofsky's Notes
a Field
consist
These
are
of Action"
an
of
early
now
in the
draft
in
"Red
the
Poetry
University
at
in
pencil
with
sheaf,
of a few
in
and written
first
pages
length
in ink)
and
the last a 71-page
and blue crayon, marked
up in the same
corrected
in pencil,
corrections
ink, and red
many
and with
the same tools as the Paterson
Reviewing
as
Poem
"The
Library.
Notebook"
and seven drafts
(most
odd moments
and
then
snatched
7
Selected
p. 197.
he wrote
205-6.
SE,
Room
Verse
essay,
that Williams
out,
of Olson's
many
5
collection
Williams
) Olson's
Protective
in the sense
statement
that
Carlos
from it. (Unpublished
in
(New York:
fashion
manuscripts.
on ANEW
1947-48 issue of The New
for the Winter
as "fertile,
poems
prolific
that might
be a direction
for the
well
was
Williams
his "new under
believed,
breakthrough,
a metrical
in the
of the line structure,"
of his
discovered
pattern
standing
language
own
were
Here
lines
that
could
the
and
before
12).
pressure
day"
(p.
"expand
physically
the speed
In that lay "the new. And
of thought."
the release.
And
the happiness"
(p.
for example,
of Poetry,
Quarterly
in
a revolution
for
possibilities"
future
(p. 11). Zukofsky's
major
14).
The
Williams
poem
Williams
his
praised
in the
line
poetic
to as containing
attention
drew
particularly
friend's
in its fullness
the
new line Zukof sky had worked out is his very fine "No. 42," reprinted in his All: The
Collected
8 The
Short
inability
felt. In
1923-1964
109-11.
York: W. W.
Poems,
(New
Norton),
pp.
own
to
had
affected
Eliot's
poetry,
change
enough
seriously
think of Eliot
without
of a
fact, he could
hardly
thinking
strongly
fluid
line moving
to meet
"the
get
into marmoreal
stasis.
Williams
potentially
did
finally
he
when
So, for example,
a
at the
Eliot
1948, when
gave
reading
a
sent his friend Robert
McAlmon
picture
with
the comment
he person
that, though
rigidity,
in mid-November,
in
Williams
Washington,
Eliot"
of Congress
of the Statuary
Hall
in the Capitol
postcard
like Eliot,
"now
that I have met
last night
the party
the reading]
him,
ally
[following
the reverse
resembled
of this card."
the collection
of Norman
Holmes
(From
closely
Pearson.
)
9 Auden's
on
immediate
American
from
audiences
the late thirties
among
popularity
not
to threaten
was
it seemed
the
he
direction
very
Williams;
only
angered
hoping
Library
American
would
poetry
In his
take.
unfinished
collaborative
Man
novel,
in late 1945 and early 1946 and published posthumously), Williams
reading which
three old-timers
shared
he
and
this
Remember
at
supposedly
not
poets,
tough bunch.
too hot but
line]. Well,
Cooper
this
young
recalls a poetry
Alfred
with
young
1940.
in
in
Union
Cooper
April,
his American
for
audience
(written
Orchid
their
Union
Malcolm
and Auden
himself?
Kreymborg,
Cowley,
in his
in the Great Hall
thirties?held
early
and a half years
later he can still not forgive
of all things English:
uncritical
acceptance
Englishman
Even
five
when
the
young
Remember?
I was
there.
hitting
along
the
line
poet
with
his
English
114
Englishman
were
There
I'm
read
[an
telling
Oxford
smooth
a
his
verse
couple
authentic
accent
to
that
of American
American
got
up
and
at
smiled
those
they almost
small favor
his
that
and
verses,
their
lunks
gracious
Cf. A Williams
Massachusetts
and
in
drowned
said, I hope
you'll
their own
slobber
to their
lay
very
huzzas.
good
It was
I can't
it! And
accent,
pardon my
help
were
so tickled
to grant him any
they
Their
And he read them
hands!
faltering
were
raised
the roof with
they
and?they
to hear
and to see.
eager hands.
verses
sweet
magnificent
Garland: Petals from the Falls, 1945-1950,
14, no.
vol.
Review,
1
(Winter
ed. Paul L. Mariani, The
85. Hereafter
1973),
as MR.
cited
10Cf. Williams' review of The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems in The
New Republic, 93, 1198 (Nov. 17, 1937), 50.
11The
Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage
n.d.),
p.
77.
1965),
p.
68.
Books,
12Letter of December 19, 1946 to
Jos? Rodriguez Feo in Letters of Wallace Stevens,
ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 544.
13 "An
Approach to the Poem," in English Institute Essays, 1947 (New York: AMS
Press,
14 Ibid.
15
Ibid.,
p.
16Williams'
69.
attitude
towards
Hopkins
"a great
innovator"
and at another
early
the neatest
observations
Williams
made
"brutal"
chin
in his
notes
to "The
his
forms
to
counterbalance
over
trol
of his
his
poems
man
that
he
caught
world,
logocentric
the sensuous
Poem
continued
to
his
point
on
Hopkins
as a Field
effects
their
reality,
the
one point
he calls him
But one of
"constipated."
in
to the man's
pointing
sharp,
are
was
of Action"
"dream"
it was
but
At
shift.
content.
as a
sign of Hopkins'
He might
dream
in his
very
as
brilliant
hard,
ability
of his
self."
pulse
"abrupt
went
at the
local
to visit
hotel
the Mesa
in Cortez.
Out
Verde
with
of
that visit
their
old
friend,
came Williams'
Robert
"The
McAlmon,
Testament
in
a crafts
17After his
teaching session at the University of Utah in July of 1947, Williams
his wife
con
on
and
and
stayed
of Perpetual
Change" (Collected Later Poems, p. 103 )with its interlinear grid ( in italics ) taken from
the opening lines of Bridges' A Testament of Beauty. Williams' and Bridges' lines, laid
thus
side
content
poem
of
would
perpetual
18 Cf.
in their
cadences
the tone,
and
lexis,
remarkably
(though
inhabit
different
A
of
Williams'
quite
worlds).
clearly
study
own
I think,
in what
is a "testament"
of
ways Williams'
practice
chime
side,
by
each writer
show,
change.
"The Later
Pound,"
an
essay
Williams
lished in MR, p. 124.
19 Cf.
wrote
on
January
13,
1950,
and
pub
"A
an essay Williams
of Ezra Pound's
Present
wrote
between
Position,"
Study
and 23, and published
in MR,
p. 118.
after he had
saw that Pound
read
the Pisan
Williams
had de
1950,
Cantos,
not in those quotable
which
Pound
into
back
veloped,
"purple
passages"
kept dragging
the past, but in the "common
the
of any
was
text," where
"heavy work"
long sequence
and done
Remove
from his
Pound
and his ear for the native
done,
beautifully.
library
cadence
could
still shine
with
through
extraordinary
sensitivity.
21 This
is the same
he had with
Stevens
as
and Eliot,
were
different
argument
they
in other
In an
the crucial
Williams
moment,
difference
this
respects.
unguarded
put
January
20
By
21
way:
. . . Pound
over
and gone
to "ideas."
As he has
up his earlier
given
attempts
have
to
If
Bull.
ain't
to say,
gotta
say,
you
something
got
something
. . . But
to say . . . , as there are at
both have
you can't write."
suppose
something
to say. Both
least
several
in that and both
equal
important
things
being
being
said,
has
"You
115
then the next
poets,
step is the
as poets.
It is even conceivable
itself that will
determine
their value
implementation
one may
to me
have
that, though
impor
something
to say, the second may
him by
tant to say and the other next to
still, judging
nothing
as a
seems
more
At least the
"virtuous"
his resources
person.
poet, be the
possibility
there.
is a crucial
This
and
ture
the poet
delivered
the
distinction
poet,
whose
thought."
of Rimbaud's
of
statement
as man
where
prose,
"evidence
of
between
is in
Thought,"
could
the
give
"any
at any time.
it may
essential
come
29,
been
be
that
be
verse
if our
the
'new way
on
him
taken
entitled
the
and
paper
is
he
which
by
from
"Verse
the opening
as Evidence
at Buffalo.
the Lockwood
of measuring'
but one I shall
a fair question
was
by
predicated
I am no
as a
that
had
stressed
WilUams
1945,
put his
thoughts
or about
the man
recalled being asked if
...
anything
to
have
postpone
in
then he conjured up the image of the Mendelejeffian
element
had
to be.
some
in the
use
not
infant
element
table
helium,
for
table of
its
instance,
of atomic
weights.
measure
I find
the new
inevitable;
I set up as
to do the things
genius
must
I
I know,
the innovation
however,
predict
to find the way we miss.
Mean
have
now, will
in the
genius
I have
poet
is to blossom.
Someone,
the
discovered,
a blank
I myself
answer
of
the
had
I shall go on talking. [SLf 243.]
while
23
an
before
presence
It may
at
a field
(February 9, 1946), Williams
of
It was
ing indefinitely." And
periodic weights:
Years
writer
the
Collection
Poetry
evidence
had written
as
as man
of ideas
poet
In his lec
of action.
the
between
was
that within
poem
it Williams
The
that way
of
idea, and
phrasing
A Season
in Hell. Williams'
"Memory
Script,"
22 In a letter to Parker
Tyler
he
distinction
of Williams'
the poem
itself
action,
creating
on November
at Briarcliff
Junior
College
of
MR,
120.
as
as a Field
cited
for "The Poem
of Action,"
papers
p. 53. Hereafter
^Working
PFA.
25
Ibid.,
p. 54.
26 In his
to the
of his friends,
Charles
refers
(PFA), Williams
papers
example
working
He
the painter,
the
this
dancer.
relates
and his Russian
Scheeler,
wife,
story at
Musya,
at a critical
in his Autobiography,
from Charles
Olson's
juncture
just after quoting
length
serve as a concrete
of the
the Scheelers
Verse
Thus,
(1950).
essay
Projective
example
in a small
stone
to settle
field
of poetry.
had done was
What
down
Scheeler
theory
a Hudson
on what
had
been
remaining
formerly
mansion
60-room
with
all of its outlying
buildings.
his
its own
formal
center
had had
that field
) around
( the estate, which
By reorganizing
new
to a
less
had
himself
Scheeler
"married"
center,
necessity,"
grand
"present-day
a new
created
the "seed"
of a new
than the past, but containing
structure,
intelligence,
one
cottage,
River
colonial
the
of
estate
few
structures
with
its own
out of the elements of the past, and had filled itwith
It had
been
taken,
this
by
's Russian
for Scheeler
place
27 In
1947, Williams
early
the line,
within
(or breaks)
discovered
so far
caesura
well
might
28
SL, 163.
transference
wife,
wrote
that
of new
his muse,
that it was
he
then
for a study of the modern
to be what
prove
quantity
values,
to dance.
local artifacts (Shaker furniture ).
into
a new
context,
into
a
fitting
in the
of the caesura,
the break
handling
out the
I have
holding
"greatest
hope
use of the
The
line"
(MR
122).
expanded
was
to Greek
poetry.
saw
29 SL, 214.
116
as
30
31
SL,
216.
Abbott/Williams
32
SL,
230.
SL,
234-35.
in
correspondence
the
Poetry
Room,
Lockwood
Buffalo.
Library,
33 SL, 232.
34
35
36
SL,
236.
SL,
236-37.
37
with
Williams,
Freud
who
that
knew
the
Freud's
content
of
was
in full agreement
of Dreams,
Interpretation
was
a
of wish
indeed
"a dream,
daydream
in the
is wished
'dream'
of
for, realized
The
the
poem
It was
fulfillment."
the
poem?but
of course,
fronts,
38 Cf. Williams'
"always
phantasy?what
. . . the structure
confronts
is
itself.
Poem
else." What
something
as a Field
of Action"
the
con
structure
in SE, 281.)
("The
reality
on the
comment
of the emergency
of the omnipresent
squads
figure
once
a trickle
authorities?the
the universities?who,
of new
critics,
energy
they detect
...
to
the dams
out
from
in
have
"rush
the leak!
the
built,
leak,
escaping
they
plug
over
in their power
their fixed
the water."
in the same
And
order,
also,
essay-review,
. . . before
a
the image
of the old poetic
line as a "grill
window"
and the new
prison
line as "the
is a New
Line
The New
("A New
Measure,"
of
grill gone."
Quarterly
Poetry, II.2 (Winter 1947-48), 10.
39 "Letter to an Australian Editor,"
Briarcliff Quarterly, III.2 (October 1946), 207.
40 That Williams needed a line like the
staggered or step-down three-ply line after
his
crippling
strokes,
needed
their
more
meditative
resources,
can
in part
be
demon
strated by listening to his reading on the Caedmon LP, William Carlos Williams Read
ing His Own Poems, of poems like "To Daphne and Virginia" and "The Host" in the
new
measure,
where
the
pace
seems
correct,
next
by
listening
to his
of
reading
"The
Yachts" that same day?June 6, 1954?and then by listening to his reading of the latter
poem recorded nine years earlier (in May, 1946) and issued in An Album of Modern
An
Read
edited
by the Poets,
Anthology
by Oscar Williams.
to Williams'
two
one realizes
of
"The
that
Yachts,"
tively
recordings
as fast as he does
the poem
twice
at 71.
nearly
41
SL, 251-52.
Poetry:
TWO
POEMS
/ CHARLES
TOMLINSON
In the Intensity of Final Light,
In the intensity of final light
moss on the tree-trunks
dyeing,
green than the foliage they bear:
Hills, then, have a way of taking fire
as
To themselves
though they meant to hold
In a perpetuity
of umber, amber, gold
Those forms that, by the unstable
light of day,
Deepening,
Glares more
117
Listening
at 62 he
consecu
is
reading