Context
Reading William Carlos Williams
Linda Wagner-Martin
William Carlos Williams might have been surprised to find CONTEXT reprinting sections of his 1923 prose-poem and poem collage, "Spring
and All." Then again, writing for all of us truly common readers, the
pure products of public and state schools as has never before been true
in Western history, perhaps he would have simply nodded. And smiled. It
is at this point, after these dozen pages of Williams’s euphoric,
insistent prose, that he places poem I (untitled, named by only its
Roman numeral), the poem readers know as "Spring and All." Remember
that it opens "By the road to the contagious hospital / under the surge
of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast—a cold wind. .
. ." "Chapter
I," subtitled "Samuel Butler," follows, in which Williams argues
against the British literary traditions—named as "The Traditionalists
of Plagiarism" [making readers see that revering the traditions of art is a kind of plagiarism]. "They have their great weapons to hand: ‘science,’ ‘philosophy,’ and most dangerous of all ‘art.’ " Williams
follows this announcement of his attempt to create a truly new
aesthetic with the poems "The farmer in deep thought" and "The Easter
stars are shining" and then he returns to his aesthetic, this time an
exploration of the "traditional" poetic elements he so disdains. From
this several-page section, his tenet of revolt: The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New Directions, $14.00.
It was a gentle, a craggy, smile—less a no-nonsense smile than some of
his brusque poems might have suggested. For Williams was a gentle man,
despite his sexual pecadillos, his tendency to support his immediate
family less well than his patients, his need to run from Rutherford,
New Jersey (to Europe, several times, and, frequently, to New York
City). His gentleness kept him from cutting the throats of people who
could have been considered his competitors—instead, his address at 9
Ridge Road became a stable meeting place, a permanence that poets
traveled to: Denise Levertov, Hayden Carruth, Allen Ginsberg, Carl
Rakosi, Robert Bly, Carol Berge, Robert Creeley, Robert Coles and the
younger. And the older. Despite his normal frantic busyness, Williams
met them all with that same gentle smile. Almost a half smile.
The smile persevered even after the several strokes, one massive, that
entailed speech training as part of his general recovery. Two years
after that stroke, Dr. Williams was giving poetry readings
again—punctuated with the unexpected halts, stammers, silences that
effectively brought his listeners into the loop of "reading." Working
to say the words mimicked the kind of mental processes that had been involved in his finding those words in the first place, especially his late works:The smell of the heat is box wood
Like his "All this— / was for you, old woman. / I wanted to write a
poem / that you would understand," this caveat was Williams’s
prolegomenon for the sixty years of his poetic career (he died in the
spring of 1963, a restless but still gentle 79). The poem for his
daughters-in-law, "To Daphne and Virginia," continued,
when rousing us
a movement of the air
stirs our thoughts. . . .
Be Patient that I address you in a poem,
there is no other
fit medium
The mind
Williams as poet placed himself in relation to the people of his
existence; from those relationships came his poems. It was a techique
based on little but emotion, a technique which few other modernists had
discovered.
lives there. It is uncertain,
can trick us and leave us
agonized. But for resources
what can equal it?
There is nothing. We
should be lost
without its wings to
fly off upon . . . .
One of the gifts that Williams brought to modern and contemporary
poetry was his recognition of the difficulty of finding language, of
choosing words. Many of the better established modern poets—Eliot,
Stevens, even e. e. cummings—were more interested in polishing the
word, moving it into patterns that defied past aesthetic forms. Their
art was the art of construction, reconstruction. Williams’s was the art
of bringing emotion into words.
Not for nothing was Williams a close friend of Kenneth Burke, whose
notes for Williams’s interest in Native American culture—as well as
language in general—turn up in the Beinecke Library Williams
Collection. The process of language was one of the avenues Williams opened which Robert Creeley
followed, for instance: Wittgenstein was never the whole story. But
because Williams was poised to be a scientist, because he had literally
gone from secondary school into the University of Pennsylvania medical
school (skipping those four years of undergraduate college that have
since come to be considered a requisite), he had to find his own way
through the labyrinth of the world’s scientific words: he had to see that no meaning existed without the exact word. Alone, he moved from
the scientific precision of academic language to a speech-like voicing
that tried to recreate the human connection: from medical textbook to
lyric, Williams was a gifted (but consistently unsure) pioneer in the
uses of language. His search for the word was no less tortured at the
turn into the twentieth century than it is today: as he wrote before
the publication of any of his books, in the imitative language that to
him sounded the way a poem should—though not necessarily his poem "I
will write of the leaves and the moon in a tree top! / I will sing then
the song, long in the making—"
Williams’s earliest poems are troubling try-pieces, some based on the
rhythms of chant, some drawn from archaic sources—and that pose as real
poetry because of their reliance on "thy" and "thou." Embarrassing to
Ezra Pound, that quintessential maker of things new, and H. D., who was
less quick to judge the ebullient Williams, his poems showed that he
had been trained on the classics of the Western world. No wonder Pound
sent him "reading lists" for the next fifty years; no wonder H. D. and
Marianne Moore considered him an untaught savage—though a man always
gentle, excited by the word, and particularly by the way the two of
them used it. (Williams cared more for H. D.’s imagist poems than for
anything Pound ever produced.)
Most of the poems by William Carlos Williams that are anthologized
today, most of the poems that people know, come from the first decade
of Williams’s writing—the years when he was not only unknown but, if
known at all, considered some kind of wild man of American poetry. More
properly, of American speech. Other ambitious United States poets were
staking their claims to greatness on the fact that they were happily
derivative of British speech and language patterns: highly educated,
for the most part, such American poets as Conrad Aiken, Eliot, John
Gould Fletcher, Dos Passos and e. e. cummings, Amy Lowell and of course
Pound wanted to claim the tradition of the English language in toto.
Williams’s poems sounded wrong to most ears so trained. It was those
ears, however, that were wrong. Williams’s voice in his poems was the
colloquial, and definitely uneducated, outbreak of passion that no
properly refined reader could recognize. Or it was the starkly phrased
report of that passion—or that person—without any pointed moralizing.
In either case, polite readers turned away.
One of Williams’s most important books, published in 1917, was the collection Al Que Quiere! Drawn from the language of his Spanish-speaking family, especially his
all-important mother who was Puerto Rican, and given the passionate
exclamation mark (used by no practicing poet of the time except perhaps
e. e. cummings), Williams’s title was a defiant "to him who wants it,"
a thumbing of his by-now experienced nose at what the academic (and
accepted) modernist poets and critics thought of his work. Whereas in
his first attempts to publish, he had used "William Williams" as his
writing name, alternating with "W. C. Williams," he had begun using his
Spanish-flavored given name as a signature of rebellion. (People in
educated circles spoke French and Italian; very few even recognized
Spanish.) Al Que Quiere! includes more than twenty of
Williams’s poems familiar to readers today; yet as a book, it received
nothing but grudging notice when it was mentioned at all in omnibus
reviews.
Williams’s 1923 Spring and All is, in many ways, an answer to the icy stillness that greeted Al Que Quiere! (Between the two came his English titled collection, also a key book in
Williams’s oeuvre, Sour Grapes. It was received with even less
enthusiasm.) So by the time of the early 1920s, when United States
publishers were searching for new writers in order to take advantage of
American prosperity—and interest in new forms of art—Williams, still
undiscovered, still paying to publish his own collections through
near-vanity press avenues, spoke out.
It was there all along: the route to the true American language.
Intentionally rough, the bluff Dr. Williams reacts here as well to the
spectacular reception of Eliot’s The Waste Land. Williams privileges
emotion as it creates the power of the imagination, and then comments
directly on Eliot’s erudite tapestry of words. (It is, after all, 1923;
The Waste Land, like Joyce’s closely watched Ulysses, appeared in 1922.) As Williams writes in Spring and All,
I love my fellow creature. Jesus,
Spring and All is a mixed-form "poem"about, among other things,
spring, the season that undoes us.With a Coleridgian emphasis, Williams vaunts the
results of that undoing:
how I love him: endways, sideways,
frontways and all the other ways--but
he doesn't exist! Neither does she. I
do, in a bastardly sort of way.
To whom then am I addressed? To
the imagination. [. . .]
If I could say what is in my mind in
Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so.
But I cannot. I speak for the integrity
of the soul and the greatness of life's
inanity; the formality of its boredom;
the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill!
kill! let there be fresh meat. . . .
The imagination, intoxicated by
prohibitions, rises to drunken heights
to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it
kill. The imagination is supreme. All thought of misery has left us.
Plagiarizing, or at least borrowing, Williams never runs for the safe
assurance of shoring up the myriad fragments of his text. In The Waste Land, as in his much later Four Quartets,
Eliot returns to his chosen, stable still point. Williams, in contrast,
wants anarchy: he creates the chaotic by misnumbering sections of his
poem, inverting chapter markers, and juxtaposing the formal poems with
the usually raucous prose, prose intentionally reasonless—exuberant,
meandering, yet cohesive with the force of the writer’s unfettered
imagination. The imagination here—as in Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations, The Great American Novel, and In the American Grain, all products of the early mid-1920s—assumes the reins to lead the poet, and the reader, to the truth.
Why should we care? Children laugh-
ingly fling themselves under the wheels
of the street cars, airplanes crash gaily
to the earth. Someone has written a
poem.
Oh life, bizarre fowl, what color are
your wings? Green, blue, red, yellow,
purple, white, brown, orange, black,
grey? In the imagination, flying above
the wreck of ten thousand million
souls, I see you departing sadly for the
land of plants and insects, already far
out to sea. (Thank you, I know well
what I am plagiarizing).
"To Elsie," "At the ballgame," "Spring and All," and the twenty-some other poems embedded in the prose text of Spring and All—each
insists on the poetry of life that births itself, regardless of its
formal qualities, from the imagination given language. By separating
out the poems, as editors until recently did, by omitting Williams’s
intentionally lush, capricious prose, readers have been denied the
efficacy of the poet’s creation. The warning was there all along.
Williams had written in his "Chapter VI":
Yes, the imagination, drunk with
To restore the flavor of the kind of coherence that Spring and All as a whole illustrates, look at the two sections which follow the quoted passage above:
prohibitions, has destroyed and recre-
ated everything afresh in the likeness
of that which it was. Now indeed men
look about in amazement at each other
with a full realization of the meaning
of "art."
CHAPTER 2
It is spring: life again begins to
assume its normal appearance as of
"today." Only the imagination is unde-
ceived. The volcanos are extinct. Coal
is beginning to be dug again where the
fern forests stood last night. (If an
error is noted here, pay no attention to
it.)
CHAPTER XIX I realize that the chapters are
rather quick in their sequence and that
nothing much is contained in any one
of them but no one should be surprised
at this today.
THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM
It is spring. That is to say, it is
approaching THE BEGINNING. . . .
Suddenly it is at an end. THE WORLD
IS NEW.
With the narrative precision that often marked Williams’s art, this
poem—announcing spring—is followed by the gentle flowering of "II"
("Pink confused with white") and then Williams leads the reader back to
his prose prolegomenon. Among the wise sentences in this section: "The
imagination, freed from the handcuffs of ‘art,’ takes the lead! Her
feet are bare and not too delicate. . . ."What I put down of value will have
That Williams sustains this remarkable formal melange for sixty pages (in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1) is proof of the integrity of a powerful, and hungering, imagination set loose. Aesthetic freedom is a natural result.
this value: an escape from crude sym-
bolism, the annihilation of strained
associations, complicated ritualistic
forms designed to separate the work
from "reality"--such as rhyme, meter
as meter and not as the essential of the
The work will be in the realm of the
imagination as plain as the sky is to a
fisherman.
More years ago than I like to remember, I made the prediction that
Williams would come into the twenty-first century renowned as a master
of fiction. Win some, lose some. At least Williams is still with us,
while other poets as important—Hart Crane, Robinson Jeffers, e. e.
cummings, and even Pound—are struggling to maintain their pages in
conventional anthologies. James Laughlin always commended me for my
industry—during the 1960s and 1970s—for keeping Williams’s name in
circulation. Clearly, today’s response to Williams has nothing to do
with what such academics as James Breslin, Jim Guimond, Fred Eckman,
Charles Tomlinson and others wrote in the 1970s; it has to do with
Williams’s writing.
Eclipsed through the 1980s and 1990s by the critical world’s attention
to various kinds of theory, William Carlos Williams’s strain of
American writing is ready to resurface. Part of the twenty-first
century’s interest in Williams will come from the continuous excavation
of Walt Whitman, newly perceived at least in part from the perspective
of gay theory. But more of it accrues from the recent prominence of the
Beats, occasioned first by their literal deaths (Ginsberg, Corso,
Levertov) but more importantly by their relevance to college-age
readers. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, though seldom assigned for classes, handily sells more than 100,000
copies every year; Robert Creeley’s recent Lannan Award for Lifetime
Achievement brings the most dedicated of Williams’s friends to a
visibility that sometimes seemed to have gone underground. Even before
the terror of 9-11, today’s readers tended to be unimpressed by
traditional greatness captured in traditional forms. They were people
in search of their own aesthetics, one comprised of electronic images,
incredibly fast-paced insights, subjectively unique
perspectives—undergirded with both passion and gentleness. William
Carlos Williams would have recognized these readers. Above all, he
would have welcomed them.
Selected Works by William Carlos Williams
The Build-Up. New Directions, $9.95.
Imaginations. New Directions, $14.95.
In the American Grain. New Directions, $10.95.
In the Money. New Directions, $19.95.
Paterson. New Directions, $12.95.
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. New Directions, $9.95.
White Mule. New Directions, $12.95.
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. New Directions, vol. 1: $40.00; vol. 2: 37.50
