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3. ]. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers 4. Rod Notes NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE: THE RIVER 1. See also Emily Mitchell Wallace, A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968) Intro­ ductory note, pp. xix-xx. [Hereafter cited as Wallace.] 2. Unpublished notes relating to IWWP in American Literature Collection, Yale University Library. 3. ]. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966) p. 287. 4. Rod Townley, The Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975) p. 42. Stuart Peterfreund, 'Keats's Influence on William Carlos Williams', William Carlos Williams Newsletter, vol. III, no 1 (Spring 1977) pp. 8-13, runs counter to the usual argument that Williams's earliest career as a poet was a struggle between the influences of Keats and Whitman, which resulted in Williams moving away from Keats and towards his own true voice. Peterfreund shows Keatsian influence up to and including Paterson. According to Weaver, 'In March 1908 Ezra Pound, who was passing through Rutherford on his way to Europe, saw Williams' long Keatsian poem "Philip and Oradie", and pronounced it "great" - Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: the American Back­ ground (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1"971) p. 7. Or so Williams wrote to his brother Edgar on 18 March 1908 (Yale). 5. The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Har­ court, Brace & World, 1950; Harvest Books edn, 1967) p. 3. Quotes taken from the paperback edition. 6. Ibid., pp. 7-8. 7. James E. Breslin suggests that 'As a young writer, Williams first thought he was Keats, later thought he was Pound, but then through a 1913 reading of Leaves of Grass, discovered he was William Carlos Williams' - 'William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition', Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding (selected papers from the English Institute), ed. Philip Damon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967) p. 153. In IWWP Williams gives the impression of having read Leaves of Grass a decade or so earlier. Mr Breslin reads 'The Wanderer' as a poem much influenced by Whitman and perhaps tends to undervalue Pound's relation­ ship to Williams. 8.- Pound's 'Introductory Note' to The Tempers is reproduced in IWWP, pp. 12-13. 9. Pound, Literary Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1954) p. 9. 179 180 Notes 10. The Egoist, vol. I, no. 6 (16 March 1914) pp. 109-11. (See Wallace C4.) 11. A page of Williams ms. is reproduced in Massachusetts Review (Winter 1962) p. 307, with the comment: 'A manuscript page of WCWs earliest extant verse, 1908 .... It is actually in the possession of John C. Thirlwall.' Presumably this is the 'Philip and Oradie' referred to by Weaver, op. cit., p. 7. 12. James Guimond, The Art of William Carlos Williams: a Discovery and Possession of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968) p. 15. 13. Patrick Renshaw, The Wobblies: The Story of Syndicalism in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1967) pp. 122-8. The strike eventually failed, but not before involving 25,000 workers. Some lines from this section of the poem made Eda Lou Walton think 'The Wanderer' a recent poem when she reviewed CCP in The New Masses (29 November 1938). 14. Poets of Reality, p. 297. 15. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto (eds and trans.), Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews (New York: Doubleday, 1965) p. ix. See also Joseph N. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counter­ Poetics of William Carlos Williams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974) pp. 61-2. 16. Poets of Reality, p. 287. 17. Transfigured Night (New York: Macmillan, 1946) p. xi. (See Wallace B49.) 18. Tony Tanner, The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in Amen'can Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). Williams is considered only very briefly, but the book as a whole details the framework, as far back as Emerson, in which Williams's work must be set. 19. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, 1935) p. 196. Quoted by Tanner, op. cit., p. 193. 20. Sherman Paul, 'The Music of Survival: a Biography of a Poem by William Carlos Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1968), in an interesting discussion of dance in Williams, regards this rather attenuated poem, in the shape 'of a pirouette', as successful. 21. Bram Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969) p. 52. 22. Guimond, op. cit., p. 42, considers the poem 'remarkably like Demuth's "white architecture" series'. 23. This poem is quite closely related to Williams's short story 'A Descendant of Kings'. 24. See SE, p. 303. 25. Poets of Reality, p. 288. 26. Not included in AQQ. First published in Others, vol. III, no. i Quly 1916) p. 30. (See Wallace C1l.) 27. William Carlos Williams: a Collection of Cn'tical Essays, ed. J. Hillis Miller (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966). p. 48. NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO: DESCENT AND CONTACT 1. Pound dedicated Ripostes to Williams, quoting from Propertius: 'Quos ego Notes 181 Persephonae maxima dona feram'. Weaver suggests that the title itself came directly from Pound (Weaver, op. cit., p. 6). 2. Literary Essays, p. 397. 3. A Novelette and Other Prose (Toulon: To Publishers, 1932) pp. 20f. (cited hereafter as A Novelette). 4. SE, p. 125. Reed Whittemore, in his biography of Williams, calls Kora in Hell his 'winter book', and suggests that its main impetus was the 'dark stealings' of Williams's sex life. Whittemore's book is puzzling because so often its tone is just wrong if the writer intends to treat his subject seriously and as worthy of respect. The phrase 'winter book' is appropriate, though, if we read it as describing what is antithetical to Venus, and the birth of spring. See Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) pp. 122-4, 156-9. 5. The terms are T.E. Hulme's. Much of Williams's subsequent thinking on the poem (a term he preferred to 'poetry') concurs with Hulme's in Speculations (London: Routledge, 1924) and Further Speculations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). See also A. Kingsley Weatherhead, The Edge of the Image (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967) pp. 29-31. 6. For the publishing history of Kora in Hell, see Joseph Evans Slate, 'Kora in Opacity: Williams' Improvisations', journal of Modem Literature, vol. I, no. 4 (May 1971) pp. 463-76. 7. The Letters of Ezra Pound, p. 124 (compare variant version in SE, p. 8). Williams's description of deflection from 'the thing' as 'an easy lateral sliding' may be related to Hulme's remark on the language of poetry: 'It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process' (Speculations, p. 134). 'Romanticism and Classicism', the essay in which this occurs, was, of course, written long before 1924. 8. Expressing ideas pervasive in his work, these phrases.occur in Marshall McLuhan's Verbi- Voco- Visual Explorations (New York: Something Else Press, 1967). 9. A Novelette, p. 25. 10. In a useful essay, which offers some measure of summary interpretation, Sherman Paul objects to the kind of explication by association which inevitably relates Kora in Hell to Les Illuminations. See Sherman Paul, 'A Sketchbook of the Artist in his Thirty-Fourth Year: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell: Improvisations', in The Shaken Realist, ed. Melvin ]. Friedman and John B. Vickery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970) pp. 21-44. On the dance in Kora in Hell, see Linda W. Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970) pp. 20-3. 11. Speculations, p. 146. Also, Mike Weaver, in several succinct pages of background, draws attention to Williams's specific mention in the 'Prologue' of Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which was introduced to English readers by the painter Marsden Hartley shortly before he met Williams. The concept of the 'Improvisation', 'a largely unconscious, spontaneous expression of inner character, non-material in nature', comes directly from Kandinsky. See Weaver, op. cit., 37-9. 182 Notes 12. Karl Shapiro, In Defense of Ignorance (New York: Random House, 1960; paperback edn, 1965) p. 154. Quotes come from paperback edition. 13. 'Notes from a Talk on Poetry', Poetry, vol. XIV (July 1919) pp. 211-16. 14. John Dewey, 'Americanism and Localism', The Dial, vol. LXVIII (June 1920) pp. 684-8. 15. Sour Grapes (Boston, Mass.: Four Seas, 1921). The State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNYAB) has a typescript of'March' edited by H.D., with wholesale excisions. Williams followed many of her suggestions, but did not deJect section V. 16. SL, no. 32, pp. 46, 47. 17. Bram Dijkstra, op. cit., pp. 162-7, provides illuminating comments on the link between the flower poems in Sour Grapes and the paintings of Williams's friend Charles Demuth. Demuth's painting may well have contributed at this point to the continued loosening of William's verse technique. 18. Neil Myers, 'Sentimentalism in the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams', American Literature, vol. 37 (1965-6) p. 462. 19. Poets of Reality, p. 349. NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE: "SPRING AND ALL" 1. Spring and All (Dijon: Contact Publishing Co., 1923); also included in Imaginations. 2. Dijkstra, op. cit., pp. 130-7; Rosenfeld actually wrote at length about Spring and All in Port of New York, first published in 1924 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World). 3. The most readily available complete text of Spring and All is William Carlos Williams, Imaginations, ed.
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