Context
from Kora in Hell: Improvisations
William Carlos Williams
These fragments are from Williams’s 1920 Kora in Hell. Kora
was one of Williams’s favorite creations because it revealed “myself to
me.” We like it because it is incorrigible, uncompromising and very
mean to T. S. Eliot and “dear fat Stevens.” Hilda Doolittle
before she began to write poetry or at least before she began to show
it to anyone would say: “You’re not satisfied with me, are you Billy?
There’s something lacking, isn’t there?” When I was with her my feet
always seemed to be sticking to the ground while she would be walking
on the tips of the grass stems. Ten years later as assistant editor of the Egoist she refers to my long poem, “March,” which thanks to her own and her
husband’s friendly attentions finally appeared there in a purified form: 14 Aug. 1916 I
trust you will not hate me for wanting to delete from your poem all the
flippancies. The reason I want to do this is that the beautiful lines
are so very beautiful—so in the tone and spirit of your Postlude—(which to me stands, a Nike, supreme among your poems). I think there is real beauty—and real beauty is a rare and sacred thing in this generation—in
all the pyramid, Ashur-ban-i-pal bits and in the Fiesole and in the
wind at the very last. I don’t know what you think but I
consider this business of writing a very sacred thing!—I think you have
the “spark”—am sure of it, and when you speak direct are a poet. I feel in the hey-ding-ding touch running through your poem a derivative tendency which, to me, is not you—not your very self. It is as if you were ashamed of your Spirit, ashamed of your inspiration!—as if you mocked at your
own song. It’s very well to mock at yourself—it is a spiritual sin to
mock at your inspiration— Oh well, all this might be
very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered
to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the
time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one
end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change
is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please
and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of
change is on it. *** There is no man even though he
dare who can make beauty his own and “so at last live,” at least there
is no man better situated for that achievement than another. As
Prufrock longed for his silly lady, so Kensington longs for its
Hardanger dairymaid. By a mere twist of the imagination, if Prufrock
only knew it, the whole world can be inverted (why else are there
wars?) and the mermaids be set warbling to whoever will listen to them.
Seesaw and blindman’s bluff converted into a sort of football. But
the summit of United States achievement, according to Mr. J.—who can
discourse on Catullus—is that very beautiful poem of Eliot’s, “La
Figlia che Piange”: just the right amount of everything drained
through, etc., etc., etc., etc., the rhythm delicately studied and—IT
CONFORMS! ergo, here we have “the very fine flower of the finest spirit of the United States.” *** [Ezra
Pound] is the best enemy United States verse has. He is interested,
passionately interested—even if he doesn’t know what he is talking
about. But of course he does know what he is talking about. He does
not, however, know everything, not by more than half. The accordances
of which Americans have the parts and the colors but not the
completions before them pass beyond the attempts of his thought. It is
a middle-aging blight of the imagination. I praise those who
have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go direct toward
their vision of perfection in an objective world where the signposts
are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their
paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove. Dear
fat Stevens, thawing out so beautifully at forty! I was one day irately
damning those who run to London when Stevens caught me up with his
mild: “But where in the world will you have them run to?” *** There
is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its
own seasons reversing the usual order at will. Of the air of the
coldest room it will seem to build the hottest passions. Mozart would
dance with his wife, whistling his own tune to keep the cold away and
Villon ceased to write upon his Petit Testament only when the ink was
frozen. But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and
indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with
other matter.
Dear Bill:—
Hilda
