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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
William Carlos Williams invented his own form for Paterson. His long and complex poem has a number of important literary forebears and counterparts, including the other major American sequences (particularly Song of Myself and the Cantos), but in each case it is more unlike than like the work with which it shares significant affinities. The poem is a vast montage comprised of associated images, symbols, and themes. Prose is interspersed with various sorts of poetry, which gains its effects through metrical variations, tonal modulations, and concrete imagery. A close look at a representative formal passage and a loose “unfinished piece” helps to clarify the poet's strategy of maneuvering the reader through a series of alternately high- and low-pitched experiences. Williams pays particular attention to visual patterns and to auditory effects, relying heavily on the American idiom and on spoken language. His diction, like his handling of theme, allusion, imagery, and sound, is part of an attempt to break with outmoded conventions and to find a measure and a form capable of expressing his particular vision of contemporary urban America. The sequence as a whole, though uneven in quality, provides incontrovertible evidence of his integrity and of his skill.
1 “The Long Poem,” The New York Review of Books (14 April 1966), p. 18.
2 Lowell, “William Carlos Williams,” The Hudson Review, xiv (Winter 1961–62), 531; Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), p. 112; Rosenthal, “Speaking of Books: William Carlos Williams,” The New York Times Book Review (29 Aug. 1965), p. 30; Bennett, “The Lyre and the Sledgehammer,” The Hudson Review, v (Summer 1952), 303. For critical evaluations of Paterson the following are especially useful: William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966); Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, The Metamorphic Tradition in Modem Poetry (New Brunswick, N. J., 1955); M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets (New York, 1960); Glauco Cambon, The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry (Blooming-ton, Ind., 1963); L. S. Dembo, Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1966); and Linda Welshimer Wagner, The Poems of William Carlos Williams (Middletown, Conn., 1964). There are three other books exclusively about Williams. Alan Ostrom, in The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams (Carbondale, I11., 1966), makes only scattered references to Paterson, and Vivienne Koch's William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Conn., 1950) discusses only Books i and n. Walter Scott Peterson's An Approach to Paterson (New Haven, Conn., 1967) summarizes the first four books. J. Hillis Miller, in Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), concentrates on the shorter poems, but many of his observations can be applied to Paterson.
3 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (Norfolk, Conn., 1963), p. 259. Copyright 1946, 1948, 1951, 1958 by William Carlos Williams. Passages reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Page numbers for subsequent quotations or references to Paterson will be given in the text.
4 John Malcolm Brinnin, William Carlos Williams (Minneapolis, Minn., 1963), p. 37. Brinnin's pamphlet gives a lucid introduction to the poet.
5 In describing Book i, Randall Jarrell wrote: “the organization of Paterson is musical to an almost unprecedented degree: Dr. Williams introduces a theme that stands for an idea, repeats it over and over in varied forms, develops it side by side with two or three other themes that are being developed, recurs to it time and time again throughout the poem, and echoes it for ironic or grotesque effects in thoroughly incongruous contexts” (“The Poet and His Public,” Partisan Review, xiii, Sept.-Oct. 1946, 493). Vivienne Koch commented on the relationship between Book i and a “symphonic overture” (William Carlos Williams, p. 135). M. K. Spears noted the musical structure in Book ii (“Failure of Language,” Poetry, lxxvi, April 1950, 40), and Babette Deutsch suggested that the structure of Book iv—and of the poem as a whole—is musical in “presentation and recapitulation of themes” (Poetry in Our Time, New York, 1956, p. 108).
6 Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1954), p. 222.
7 Pearce, p. 73.
8 The Modern Poets, pp. 236–237.
9 Pearce, p. 75. For additional material on the “open sequence,” the following books by M. L. Rosenthal are especially valuable: A Primer of Ezra Pound (New York, 1966), The New Poets (New York, 1967), and The Modern Poets.
10 “William Carlos Williams: In Memoriam,” National Review, xiv (26 March 1963), 237.
11 “William Carlos Williams: Two Judgments,” in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966), p. 48. See also two articles by James E. Breslin, “Whitman and the Early Development of William Carlos Williams,” PMLA, lxxxii (Dec. 1967), 613–621, and “William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition,” in Literature and Historical Understanding, English Institute Essays, ed. Phillip Damon (New York, 1967);
12 “Prose from Spring and All,” in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 20.
13 Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. John Kouwen-hoven (New York, 1950), p. 548. Williams' fundamental premise, Rosenthal asserts, “is that the meanest of experiential data have their transcendent aesthetic potentiality, and hence that experience is the key to realization.” The William Carlos Williams Reader (New York, 1966), p. xxvi.
14 “Prose from Spring and All,” p. 20.
15 The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1957), pp. 135–136.
16 Herbert Bergman, “Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman,” AL, xxvii (1955), 60. The quotation is from an unpublished essay in the Yale Univ. Library.
17 Personae of Ezra Pound (New York, 1926), p. 89.
18 The Modern Poets, p. 71.
19 Pearce, p. 101.
20 Deutsch, p. 108.
21 The Selected Letters, p. 214.
22 The Selected Letters, pp. 226–227. 23 The Modern Poets, p. 89.
24 “William Carlos Williams,” in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 172.
25 The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 19S2), p. 39.
26 The Selected Letters, p. 186. Additional analysis of the contrasting approaches of Crane and Williams can be found in the brilliant chapters on these poets in L. S. Dembo's Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry.
27 I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal (Boston, 1958), p. 74.
28 I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 73.
29 The Selected Letters, p. 265.
30 I Wanted to Write a Poem, p. 52.
31 William Carlos Williams manuscripts and letters, Collection of American Literature, Yale Univ. Library, New Haven, Conn. Previously uncollected and/or unpublished material copyright © 1969 by Florence H. Williams.
32 Selected Essays, p. 111. 33 Poets of Reality, p. 319.
34 “Poetry of Feeling,” in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 69.
35 Primitivism and Decadence (New York, 1937), p. 82.
36 “The Lyre and the Sledgehammer,” The Hudson Review, v (Summer 1952), 305.
37 “A View of Three Poets,” Partisan Review, xviii (Nov.-Dec. 1951), 698.
38 William Carlos Williams unpublished manuscripts, Lockwood Memorial Library Poetry Collection, State Univ. of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, N. Y.
39 The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Conn., 1951), p. 353.
40 Poets of Reality, p. 301. For an illuminating discussion of the influence of Williams' prosodie theory, see the chapter on “The ‘Projectivist’ Movement” in Rosenthal's The New Poets.
41 Buffalo papers.
42 Yale papers.
43 Selected Essays, p. 163.
44 Selected Essays, p. 128.
45 Selected Essays, p. 290.
46 The Selected Letters, p. 134.
47 “William Carlos Williams,” in William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 157.
48 Stanley Koehler, “The Art of Poetry VI: William Carlos Williams” (interview), The Paris Review (Summer-Fall 1964), p. 117.
49 “The Unicorn in Paterson: William Carlos Williams,” Thought, xxxv (Winter 1960), 544. This essay is also in the Collection of Critical Essays.
50 Bennett, p. 302.