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William Carlos Williams: an American Master

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William Carlos Williams: an American Master InSight: RIVIER ACADEMIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 4, NUMBER 2, FALL 2008 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: AN AMERICAN MASTER Paul A. Lizotte, Ph.D.* Professor, Department of English and Communication, Rivier College It is difficult to generalize about William Carlos Williams as a poet and as a person. A physician his entire life, Williams at the same time had a long and distinguished poetic career. Born in 1883, he published his first volume of poetry in 1909 and continued publishing poetry, short fiction, novels, plays, and essays until his death in 1963. It can easily be argued that Williams is the most important American poet of the 20th century. Although his work did not gain widespread recognition until the 40’s and 50’s, Williams had an enormous influence on younger poets—Creeley, Duncan, Lowell, Ginsburg—so that in looking back it seems clear that Williams’ is the dominant tradition in 20th century American poetry. And yet, we are certainly far less familiar with Williams’ work than with that of T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost. People's acquaintance with Williams is usually limited to “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This is just to say” (the poem about the plums), and perhaps “The Yachts.” Given the anthology selections, it is sometimes difficult to determine what it is about Williams—that minimalist poet of hard, angular surfaces, a collector, it seems, more of “found” poems than of “made” poems—that makes him so significant a force in the history of American poetry and so substantial a poet in his own right. There is no doubt about it—Williams is a difficult poet. But the difficulty of a poem such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” is not so much one of explication as one of reception. Even today we have trouble accounting for the distinct value of such a poem—or whether it even merits the term “poem” at all. As anyone who has tried to teach "The Red Wheel Barrow" knows well (“a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain /water / beside the white / chickens”), it is difficult to get students to share the ecstatic discovery of the obvious which seems, indeed, to be the poem's very point. In the following pages, I want to suggest how such work fits into Williams’ larger vision of poetry in general, and American poetry in particular, by charting the contours of his thought and introducing some of the themes which underlie his poetic career. Language Emerson’s essay “Nature,” perhaps the most important document of the American Romantic movement, begins with this challenge: “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (Selected Writings 3). And this is the basic question that drives all of Williams’ poetry too. At the beginning of Spring and All, a collection of alternating sections of poetry and prose which he published in 1923, Williams decries the “constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world” (Imaginations 88). Poetry, his poetry, must break down those barriers. Thus the poet’s task is to make us see the world, not in terms of our past associations or traditional responses, but in the freshness, as his contemporary and fellow-poet Wallace Stevens put it, of the “first idea” itself. Only in this way can we repossess our world, and through it, our own imaginative possibilities. The key to repossessing our world is language. For Williams, the world does not exist apart from language, so that a change in our perception can only come about through a change in the language we use to interpret that perception. And poetry, for Williams, was first and foremost words. However, the words themselves need to be washed clean, stripped of the weight of their traditional associations, and Copyright © 2008 by Paul A. Lizotte. Published by Rivier College, with permission. 1 ISSN 1559-9388 (online version), ISSN 1559-9396 (CD-ROM version). Paul A. Lizotte brought into new relation with one another. Again and again in his essays, Williams, like Emerson, insists on the need to reattach words to things: It’s the words, the words we need to get back to, words washed clean. Until we get the power of thought back through a new minting of the words we are actually sunk. This is a moral question at base, surely but a technical one also and first. (Selected Essays 163) Williams was continually supportive of those writers whose technical experiments with language promised the radical innovations he sought. In a review of Marianne Moore, Williams praised her poetry for “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean out, removing the aureoles that have been pasted about them or taking them bodily from greasy contexts” (Selected Essays 128). For James Joyce, it was his achievement in having “liberated words, freed them for their proper uses” (The Great American Novel 169). And with Gertrude Stein, it was her unprecedented attempts to break language free of even its conceptual framework: . [Gertrude] Stein has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean. It can’t be helped that it’s been forgotten what words are made for. It can’t be helped that the whole house has to come down. In fact the whole house has to come down. And it’s got to come down because it has to be rebuilt. And it has to be rebuilt by unbound thinking. And unbound thinking has to be done with straight, sharp words. (Selected Essays 163–164) But above all it was the painters who helped Williams discover a technique to achieve this “unbound thinking.” In the multiple perspectives and break–up of the picture plane in modern art, Williams found a technique that could liberate poetry, in much the same way the painters had liberated painting from the tyranny of perspective and verisimilitude. Williams visited the Armory Show of 19131 (actually “The [First] International Exhibition of Modern Art”) where works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque and Duchamp were first seen by the American public. These experiences with the new art coming from Europe had a tremendous impact on Williams. He later recalled his sense of liberation at seeing Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”: “I do remember how I laughed out loud when first I saw it, happily, with relief” (Autobiography 134). In a poem of this period, “The Rose,” Williams shows these influences at work. The poem is based on a collage by Cubist painter, Juan Gris, where the roses are actually photographs, cut out from a flower catalogue and pasted in. Williams’ poem tries to capture some of the tactile and dynamic quality of Gris’s work while asserting its own theme: The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air—The edge cuts without cutting meets—nothing—renews itself in metal or porcelain— whither? It ends— 2 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS: AN AMERICAN MASTER But if it ends the start is begun so that to engage roses becomes a geometry— * * * * * * The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end—of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits Crisp, worked to defeat laboredness—fragile plucked, moist, half-raised cold, precise, touching What The place between the petal's edge and the . As a symbol, the poem tells us, the rose “is obsolete.” And yet, in this very rejection of its previous meaning lies the possibility for its re-visioning. The poem invites us to see this object not for what it symbolizes but for what it is—a dynamic center of potential meaning radiating lines of force. Taken out of its familiar context, stripped of its traditional associations, and viewed in terms of its essential form, the rose can now be reconstituted in the virtual space of the imagination. As form, it has edges which “cut without cutting,” providing new surfaces for imaginative contact, and its significance is only to be determined at these points of contact with the reader/viewer: “It is at the edge of the / petal that love waits / Crisp, worked to defeat / laboredness. .” Instead of relying on convention or sentiment, this new way of seeing requires a “geometry” of the mind—a process which leads to unsuspected connections: . From the petal’s edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact—lifting from it—neither hanging nor pushing— The fragility of the flower unbruised penetrates space. Despite the transformation of this natural form into the rigid, inorganic forms of art, the rose’s essence remains “unbruised.” Imbued with a power that “penetrates space,” the rose, as now perceived, promises a new union of the world and the imagination. Thus by the end, the rose, contrary to the 3 Paul A. Lizotte poem's initial claim, is no longer obsolete. Renewed in the imagination through art, it now radiates lines of force powerful enough to “transfix” the universe and us in the process. “The Rose,” however, is not just a defense of modernist techniques. It is also an argument about the power and value of the imagination to renew our vision of the natural world. Though the artist must first destroy the previous forms, his break–up of the object provides the possibility for a break–through in perception—the work of art creates new edges, new potential points of contact, multiple perspectives, assuring that the object will remain capable of revealing unsuspected beauty and that truth will never be fixed. This technique is at work in the poem itself.
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