Selected Poems Read online

  William Carlos Williams

  __________________

  Selected Poems

  Edited with an introduction by Charles Tomlinson

  A New Directions Book

  Contents

  Introduction

  from The Wanderer (1914)

  from Al Que Quiere! (1917)

  from Sour Grapes (1921)

  from Spring and All (1921)

  from Collected Poems 1921—1931 (1934)

  from An Early Martyr (1935)

  from Adam and Eve and the City (1936)

  from The Complete Collected Poems 1906-1938 (1938)

  from The Broken Span (1941)

  from The Wedge (1944)

  from The Clouds (1948)

  from The Collected Later Poems (1950)

  from The Desert Music (1954)

  from Journey to Love (1955)

  from Pictures from Brueghel (1962)

  from Paterson (1946-58)

  Index of titles

  Index of first lines

  Introduction

  It was Ezra Pound, that indefatigable discoverer of talent, who first seized on the essential elements in Williams’s poetry. Introducing Williams’s second, still tentative, volume, The Tempers, in 1913, Pound quoted one of Williams’s similes where he speaks of a thousand freshets:

  … crowded

  Like peasants to a fair

  Clear skinned, wild from seclusion.

  Pound has instinctively isolated here elements thoroughly characteristic of this poet’s entire venture—poetic energy imagined as the rush of water; not so much Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but feelings “crowded,” forcing and yet constrained by their own earth-bound track; a certain rustic uncouthness whose end is a celebration and which wears the stamp of locality. “The only universal,” as Williams was to say later, “is the local as savages, artists and—to a lesser extent—peasants know.”

  The most interesting of Williams’s early volumes, Al Que Quiere!, appeared in 1917, the same year as T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations. Pound was there to salute the arrival of both volumes and to differentiate them:

  Distinct and as different as possible from the orderly statements of an Eliot … are the poems of Carlos Williams. If the sinuosities of Misses Moore and Loy are difficult to follow I do not know what is to be said for Mr Williams’s ramifications and abruptnesses. I do not pretend to follow all of his volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs; but for all this roughness there remains with me the conviction that there is nothing meaningless in his book, Al Que Quiere, not a line …

  Perhaps Pound overstates the “roughness” of Williams, but, in pointing out the “jerks, balks, outblurts and jump-overs,” he has arrived at one of the earliest and most accurate formulations of what Williams’s verse was about. Not only is “locality” (a sticking to New Jersey when Pound and Eliot had chosen European exile) the geographic source of Williams’s poetry, but “locality,” seen as the jerks and outblurts of speech rendered on to the here and now of the page, is the source of his lineation. In the imaginative play of Williams’s poems, where the attention is frequently turned upon outward things, the sound structure of the poems which embody that attention is an expression of strains, breath pauses, bodily constrictions and releases. Thus Williams’s “locality” begins with a somatic awareness, a physiological presence in time and space, and this in quite early poems. When he starts on his longest poem, Paterson, in the mid-forties, it is the remembrance of the act of walking through a given terrain which propels some of its best stretches, the gerund “walking” itself used as a repeated motif and, at one point, checked against the descriptions of an article, “Dynamic Posture,” from Journal of the American Medical Association: “The body is tilted slightly forward from the basic standing position and the weight thrown on the ball of the foot, while the other thigh is lifted and the leg and opposite arm are swung forward (fig. 6B) …” A sentence from later on in this article (quoted by M. Weaver in his William Carlos Williams, The American Background) would doubtless have appealed to Williams in his identification of poet and walker: “The good walker should be able to change pace, stop, start, turn, step up or down, twist or stoop, easily and quickly, without losing balance or rhythm …” The Williams poem finds analogies for most of these movements.

  The relation between subject and object appears in Williams in a series of images of physical strain—a poem from Al Que Quiere!, “Spring Strains” (p. 21), feels out its own balks and resistances against those of the scene outside where the swift flight of two birds is challenged, as:

  the blinding and red-edged sun-blur—

  creeping energy, concentrated

  counterforce—welds sky, buds, trees,

  rivets them in one puckering hold!

  At the close, the birds exert their own counterforce of speed and lightness, breaking out of the riveted landscape

  flung outward and up—disappearing suddenly!

  —the poem imparting a verb-like force to its combined prepositions, “outward and up,” and ending, as so often in Williams, on a dangling clause that pulls the main clause towards incompletion and asymmetry.

  This predilection for the open-ended and asymmetrical leaves Williams free to accept the suggestion of his surroundings with their evidence of overlap and relativity—

  roof out of line with sides

  the yards cluttered

  with old chicken wire, ashes,

  furniture gone wrong;

  the fences and outhouses

  built of barrel-staves

  and parts of boxes …

  Instead of wishing simply to reform the poor (“It’s the anarchy of poverty/delights me …”), he senses there is a point where the imagination, partaking of this anarchy, could dance with it, could “lift” it to an answering form, but a form fully responsive to the waywardness and inconclusiveness of daily realities. The broken fringes of the city in “Morning” (p. 133) witness a sort of heroism among “diminished things,” humorously absurd:

  And a church spire sketched on the sky,

  of sheet-metal and open beams, to resemble

  a church spire …

  Williams hears in all this, and in the profusion of natural fact, a kind of music—“a vague melody/of harsh threads,” as he says in “Trees” (p. 22) where the tree which first catches his eye is “crooked,” “bent … from straining / against the bitter horizontals of / a north wind,” the jump-overs at the line breaks enacting the pressure of that straining. There is no romantic fusion of subject and object possible in this nature poem: the voices of the trees may be “blent willingly / against the heaving contrabass / of the dark” but the contra-bass remains contra, the crooked tree warps itself “passionately to one side” and the poem still presses forward as Williams adds “in [its] eagerness,” the poem like the tree dissociating itself from a blent music for that “melody / of harsh threads.” “Bent” puns and rhymes eagerly against “blent” in this piece.

  When Williams in his turn paid tribute to Pound, he saw the poet—himself and Pound included—as seeking a language which “will embody all the advantageous jumps, swiftnesses, colors, movements of the day …” He was praising the collage element in the poetry of Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos, but the terms of his praise ignore those other elements of archaism and of the musée imaginaire that Williams distrusted in his friend. Both Pound and Eliot, or so Williams felt, had lost contact—it was a word whose meaning he was to go on exploring—with their American roots: they had sold out to Europe that American renaissance of which Pound himself had spoken, one which he had prophesied would “overshadow the quattrocento.
” It was an old story, for the trend of the American mind “back to Europe” had grown in its appeal in nineteenth-century America. Williams, who feels the pull himself in his first novel, A Voyage to Pagany, reflected towards the end of his life:

  The novels of Henry James featured this seeking of Europe by the heiresses of America. He himself, for complex reasons … fled to the assurances of Victorian England. It was understandable, it was even admirable in him. He became a distinguished citizen in the republic of letters and a great artist. But he left another world behind. He abandoned it.

  Williams’s poetry and novels explore an America his two most powerful contemporaries also left behind, in the raw merging of American pastoral and urban squalor. He described his struggle to make articulate that world, in Paterson, as “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands.” Williams exaggerates, of course, and as he himself well knew his insistence on “contact” and “locality” needed for its completion an awareness that was also European—the kind of awareness he recognized immediately in the reproduction of a painting by Juan Gris, with its cubist sharpness, its almost fastidious handling of a world of broken forms. “Contact” had been Whitman’s word: “I am mad for it to be in contact with me,” says Whitman of nature in Song of Myself. So is Williams. The difference lies in the eruditus of that tactus eruditus he speaks of in one poem. “A fact with him,” says Kenneth Burke, “finds its justification in the trimness of the wording.” Whitman is a great poet, but he is never trim. Trimness was something Williams could recognize and applaud in Juan Gris’s “admirable simplicity and excellent design.”

  When he speaks in the prose parts of Spring and All (1923) of Whitman, the company he puts him into is that of two great Europeans, Gris and Cézanne, announcing that “Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life.” At this point, the imagination for Williams was identified with the cubist re-structuring of reality: modern poetry with its ellipses, its confrontation of disparates, its use of verbal collages—a device both Pound and Eliot had used—provided direct analogies. In Spring and All, after a rapid transition from Gris, Cézanne and Whitman to Shakespeare, Williams tells us of the last named: “He holds no mirror up to nature but with his imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own.” Shakespeare, too, could be made to belong to the moment of cubism. This seems a far cry from “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands.”

  Kenneth Rexroth, in an excellent and too little known essay, “The Influence of French Poetry on American” (reprinted in the Penguin critical anthology, William Carlos Williams, edited by the present writer) has commented on Williams’s cubist allegiances and expresses the relation between these and Williams’s stress on localism—“place” and “contact”—with great perspicacity:

  Williams could be said to belong in the Cubist tradition—Imagism, Objectivism, the dissociation and rearrangement of the elements of concrete reality, rather than rhetoric or free association. But where Reverdy, Apollinaire, Salmon, Cendrars, Cocteau and Jacob are all urban, even megalopolitan, poets of that Paris which is the international market of objects of vertu, vice, and art, Williams has confined himself in single strictness to the life before his eyes—the life of a physician in a small town twenty miles from New York. In so doing, his localism has become international and timeless. His long quest for a completely defenseless simplicity of personal speech produces an idiom identical with that which is the end product of centuries of polish, refinement, tradition and revolution.

  On the face of it, the inheritance Williams brings to cubism seems to be very close in spirit not only to Whitman but also to Emerson and Thoreau. If “contact” is re-explored, so is Emerson’s attachment to the vernacular: “the speech of Polish mothers” was where Williams insisted he got his English from. “Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and work-yard made,” said Emerson. Williams’s famous “flatness” comes not from the field, but from the urban “work-yard” of New Jersey. As Hugh Kenner writes of Williams’s characteristic diction: “That words set in Jersey speech rhythms mean less but mean it with greater finality, is Williams’s great technical perception.”

  Emerson seems to have prepared the ground for Williams’s other war-cry, “No ideas but in things” with his “Ask the fact for the form.” Thoreau sounds yet closer with: “The roots of letters are things.” Again Emerson tells over things—“The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat …”—in the shape of a list very like Williams’s “rigmaroles,” as he calls his poems. “Bare lists of words,” says Emerson, “are found suggestive to an imaginative mind.” When Williams, long after Emerson and after Whitman’s application of this, constructed “list” poems, he came in for suspicion, as in the interview which he prints as part of Paterson 5 and in which, defending what amounts to a grocery list that forms the jagged pattern of one of his later poems, he concludes: “Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time again.”

  Paterson 5 came out in 1958. Years before, Williams had formulated his kind of poem made out of anything and with a jagged pattern, in the 1920 preface to Kora in Hell, when he wrote that a poem is “tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from the attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance by giving them thus a full being.” He was often to return to the idea of poem as dance. If, as with Emerson, Williams seems to “ask the fact for the form,” the form, once it comes, is free of the fact, is a dance above the fact. After Kora in Hell he had another shot at the formula in the prose of Spring and All, where he concludes of John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II that “his words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son’s welfare or otherwise, but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately accompanying it.”

  J. Hillis Miller in his book Poets of Reality has argued that Williams marks an historic moment for modern poetry in that his work sees the disappearance of all dualism. If it is not from dualism it is yet from a duality that much of the interest of his work arises: the words “accurately accompany” a perception of the forms of reality, they dance over or with these forms, but it is the gap between words and forms that gives poetry its chance to exist and to go on existing. Williams’s most truncated and Zen-like expression of this fact comes in the tiny

  so much depends

  upon

  a red wheel

  barrow

  glazed with rain

  water

  beside the white

  chickens

  What depends on the red wheelbarrow for Williams is the fact that its presence can be rendered over into words, that the perception can be slowed down and meditated on by. regulating, line by line, the gradual appearance of these words. The imagination “accurately accompanies” the wheelbarrow, or whatever facets of reality attract Williams, by not permitting too ready and emotional a fusion with them. When things go badly the imagination retreats into a subjective anguish—

  to an empty, windswept place

  without sun, stars or moon

  but a peculiar light as of thought

  that spins a dark fire—

  whirling upon itself … (“These,” p. 131)

  But when the dance with facts suffices, syntax, the forms of grammar, puns, the ambiguous pull between words unpunctuated or divided by line-endings, these all contribute to—accompany—the richness of a reality one can never completely fuse with, but which affords a resistance whereby the I can know itself.

  One has in Williams’s best verse a vivid sense of what Olson calls “the elements and minims of language,” down to the syllabic components or “the diphthong/ae” (“To Have Done Nothing” p. 42). It is this drama of elements, played across the ends of frequently short lines, which gives to Williams’s “free verse” its cohesiveness, and intensifies what Olson calls

  The con
tingent motion of

  each line as it

  moves with—or against—

  the whole—working

  particularly out of its immediacy.

  Williams insisted that he did not write free verse, of course. As early as 1913 he was saying: “I do not believe in vers libre, this contradiction in terms. Either the motion continues or it does not continue, either there is rhythm or no rhythm.” In the same essay (“Speech Rhythm,” quoted by Weaver, pp. 82-3), Williams writes that, in an Odyssey, “rightly considered,” “no part in its excellence but partakes of the essential nature of the whole”:

  This is the conception of the action that I want. In the other direction, inward: Imagination creates an image, point by point, piece by piece, segment by segment—into a whole, living. But each part as it plays into its neighbor, each segment into its neighbor segment and every part into every other, causing the whole—exists naturally in rhythm, and as there are waves there are tides and as there are ridges in the sand there are bars after bars …

  This intuitive conception of the kind of poetic writing he sought gets closer to essentials than Williams’s later and self-defeating attempts to define the “variable foot,” that “relative measure” which ends by being what Williams said vers libre was, a contradiction in terms. It is “the contingent motion of / each line” and what Robert Creeley has referred to as the “contentual emphases” of each line that give life to Williams’s verse, rather than any prosodie notion of feet. These emphases are brought to bear most consistently perhaps in relatively short poems. Paterson has its incidental finenesses, but there are stretches when one feels, as in others of the more lengthy pieces, that the dance has broken down. At the same time, some of the longer poems, unachieved as a whole, frequently contain passages of great brilliance. Yvor Winters is reminded by Williams of the brevity of a Herrick, which is to narrow Williams’s range somewhat unduly; after all, he is capable of the extended range of poems like “The Crimson Cyclamen” and “Elena.” The shorter poems are certainly more proof against that meditative self-regard which elsewhere often makes for sentimental proliferation. Even a poem initially as fine as “The Orchestra” (p. 204) runs aground on the most banal professions of innocence.