The Poetry of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams

First published:Poems, 1909; The Tempers, 1913; Al que quiere!, 1917; Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1920; Sour Grapes, 1921; Spring and All, 1922; Collected Poems, 1921-1931, 1934; An Early Martyr and Other Poems, 1935; Adam and Eve & the City, 1936; The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938, 1938; The Broken Span, 1941; The Wedge, 1944; Paterson (Book One, 1946; Book Two, 1948; Book Three, 1949; Book Four, 1951; Book Five, 1958); The Pink Church, 1948; The Collected Later Poems, 1950; The Collected Earlier Poems, 1951; The Desert Music and Other Poems, 1954; Journey to Love, 1955; Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, 1962

Critical Evaluation:

In the headnote to PATERSON, William Carlos Williams described his view of the function of poetry as a bare-handed answer to Greek and Latin. The deliberate rejection of a received tradition, and reliance on crude native energy of intelligence, are characteristic of a poet who has from the start been aggressively American in his poetic themes and techniques. It is not going too far to state that Williams has in fact defined himself in his poetic identity by a series of rejections: as early as 1910 he had thrown over the sonnet and the iamb as dead molds from an English and not an American tradition, and set out in search of what he would later call the “measure” of the indigenous “American idiom.” Inevitably this search meant the development of new themes and approaches, an intensive reliance on personal sensibility, and the justification of seemingly unpoetic and arbitrary materials—lists of ice-cream prices, the sounds of the sea-elephant and of trees in rain — the whole human barnyard Williams observed daily in his practice as a busy pediatrician in a New Jersey suburb.

A characteristic early poem, “Between Walls,” demonstrates Williams’ relentlessness in the process of taking up slack, of concentrating his poetic materials. In this short piece the absence of punctuation, the title entering the very syntax of the poem, and the remarkable pressure exerted on single words all tend to reify language and to de-emphasize the distinctions between words and things in poetic description. Ideas are in things is the informal refrain of PATERSON, the long epic poem in five books in which Williams extends the early discontinuous imagism of a poem like “Between Walls” into a large discourse revolving around the single figure of a man as a city. Late in his career, image and discourse finally come together supremely in this poem on personal and national history, and in the splendid old man’s love poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in the late volume, JOURNEY TO LOVE. And even in his famous early poem on a red wheelbarrow Williams had affirmed that much depends on the object under scrutiny, using emotional as well as descriptive language and exploding the restrictions of the Imagist school by attempting to unite concepts and objects in a single discourse.

PATERSON develops and makes explicit another, related cluster of speculations on the importance of place. This emphasis is implied in such poems as “Dedication for a Plot of Ground,” “Franklin Square,” and “Nantucket,” and indeed it is implied in the anxious descriptive bent of all the early poems, but only in PATERSON does it become a compelling argument against T. S. Eliot’s contention that “place is only place.” Like Wallace Stevens, Williams believes that place is all we have: there is no other place, no other experience, and so the poem will celebrate things for being and happening in themselves, just as it will praise the mind for now and then lighting on something significant. The point is that any man’s experience, however seemingly unpoetic, is universal and valuable to the degree that it is understood in all its relevant detail. Williams accordingly states at the outset of PATERSON, his long place-poem, that the attempt is to begin with particulars and then make them general. Following this method the poet is obliged to be a noticer, someone whose vision is at once accurate and clairvoyant.

A detailed sense of place, of community and connection, is all the more important amidst the violence and deracination which Williams observed in the lives of his patients, in the state of the country (“Impromptu: The Suckers” is a bitter attack on the injustice done to Sacco and Vanzetti), in our two world wars and a depression. Anticipating the extended metaphor of divorce in PATERSON, divorce between lovers, friends, poets and their readers, mind and world, thing and thought, certain earlier poems like “It Is a Living Coral” and the collection titled SPRING AND ALL convey an acute sense of debasement.

The need for accurate observation is at one with the need for love in a world without theological sanctions: energy and the release of energy, the analogies between sexual experience and other modes of knowing such as vision, are at once themes and techniques in Williams, who is one of those post-romantic poets for whom truth can lie only in the search for truth. In such a scheme no subject is too low, no juxtaposition too extravagant; the poem “Pastoral” looks, as do so many of the poems early and late, at sparrows, taking their unconscious ingenuousness as emblematic.

“Pastoral” is constructed as a haphazard montage, according to principles Williams may well have absorbed from his painter friends in Greenwich Village and Paris. According to this technique the position of images is almost as important as their content. Consecutive images are pulled ahead or back according to the lines of force of the surrounding images. Often Williams enforces a contrast of different orders of experience by such placement, setting emotional statements against descriptive ones, kinetic against static, honesty against pomposity. While Williams’ themes remain fairly constant throughout his writing career, these techniques of concentration-by-omission, and of working for speed in the movement of poems, undergo continual change. The effect of simultaneity, analogous to the all but instant impact of a painting on a canvas, is something he early achieves by the montage construction, by forcing attention to new linguistic clusters in the line taken as a unit, by making extensive use of elipse, and run-on lines.

In working as it were within the space created by the overarching metaphor of a man as a city, PATERSON represents a development of the same method of calculated juxtaposition, naturalizing as it does blocks of prose in a poetic setting so as to suggest that the sources of all writing are the same.

Williams abolishes the capital letters at the beginning of each line. This gives the desired effect of placing enormous weight on the punctuation that remains, and the dash, the parenthesis, even the white spacing between words and lines carry a heavy freight of meaning. Thus every poem discovers its own form, a “measure” determined both by the subject at hand and by the breath-rhythm of the poet.

In the process of writing PATERSON Williams discovered the three-tier line which he considered his own contribution to an American measure (he would not call it a formal metric, though he would say it possesses form). His 1955 volume, JOURNEY TO LOVE, draws upon and endlessly varies this line, as in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”

The vituperation and anger of the early poems turns often, in these later books, to gentleness, a celebration of a small circle of loved people and things; and in general Williams moves from his early concern with objects to a concern with actions, virtues, and broad scenes.

As a strictly secular poet, as a writer who has created genuine poems outside traditional metrics, as a theorist of “measure” and a detailed observer (especially in PATERSON) of the debasement of the American scene, Williams has been widely influential: poets as diverse as Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, and Theodore Roethke have gone to school to Williams and pursued his lines of inquiry and technique. The art of immediacy, it seems, is more imitable and available than the hieratic, allusive poetry of a more sophisticated poet like T. S. Eliot. Future literary historians may well decide that this less “intelligent” poet is in fact more significantly influential than Eliot in directing the course of American poetry.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, eds. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.

Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Bremen, Brian A. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Copestake, Ian D., ed. Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2004.

Fisher-Wirth, Ann W. William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989.

Gish, Robert. William Carlos Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Laughlin, James. Remembering William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1995.

Lenhart, Gary, ed. The Teachers and Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1998.

Lowney, John. The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. 1981. Reprint. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.

Vendler, Helen, ed. Voices and Visions: The Poet in America. New York: Random House, 1987.

Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. Boston: Twayne, 1989.