a world detached
by Douglas Messerli
William Carlos Williams Spring and All (Paris: Contact
Editions, 1923)
It is easy to
envision Williams, in this context, as a grandly patient assimilator, quietly
enduring Pound’s harangues to sort out those truths applicable to his own
poetry and life—a picture Williams himself encourages throughout his writings
by stressing his uncertainty about his own critical comments and by emphasizing
his early stance as observer and listener. “I paid attention very assiduously
to what I was told,” he writes in his 1948 “autobiography” I Wanted to Write a Poem; “I often reacted violently, but I weighed
what had been told me thoroughly.”
There is
little doubt that Williams did seriously pay “attention to what he was told,”
particularly by Pound. The radical differences between Williams’ Poems of 1909—of which Pound writes,
“Your book would not attract even passing attention here” [here being London]—and The
Tempers of 1913, reveal the enormous influence of Pound’s and the Imagists’
manifestoes, the origins of which Pound outlined in his famous letter to
Williams of 1908. One need only compare a poem such as the 1909 poem “The Uses
of Poetry”:
I’ve fond anticipation of a day
O’erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For
I must read a lady poesy
The
while we glide by many a leafy bay,
Hid
deep in rushes, where at random play
The
glossy black winged May-flies, or whence flee
Hush-throated nestlings in alarm,
Whom we have idly frightened with our boat’s long sway.
with “Contemporania” of 1913:
I go
back and forth now
And the
little leaves follow me
Talking of the great rain,
Of
branches broken,
And
the farmer’s curses!
But
I go back and forth
In
this corner of a garden
And
the green shoots follow me
Praising the great rain.
to perceive that the “mushy technique” of Williams’
earlier work (Pound’s phrase used to describe the poetry of the Symbolists) had
given way in a few short years to a “direct treatment of the thing” and “rhythm
composed in the sequence of the metrical phrase, not in the sequence of the
metronome” (statements from the Imagist manifesto published in Poetry in 1913). Williams’ critical
observations in Five Philosophical Essays,
written during this period, often parallel Pound’s ideas as expressed in the
first decade or so of their acquaintance. Arguments Williams makes for economy
in living, for example—
"Insofar as life is to see, it is: “Do not waste space.” Thus we see that life is to confine our energy and for us to expand our view. Which, again, shows that a perfection is the object of our activity, any perfection which alone at once contains a universal expansion concentrated into a minimum of elements constituting it, for in a perfection is no waste."—
unavoidably remind one of Pound’s and the Imagists’
insistence upon using “absolutely no word” in poetry “that does not contribute
to the presentation.” While Pound aspires to a poetry free from didacticism
(“The poet grinds the axe for no dogma,” from “The Wisdom of Poetry,” 1912),
Williams attacks dead words “which are symbols of symbols, twice removed from
vitality” (The Embodiment of Knowledge),
contending that man’s only actions can be “to prance to cheer and to point, all
of which are but one thing: praise.” And like Pound, Williams links these ideas
of art and poetry with his concept of beauty:
"We shall have the most beautiful before us; singing and architecture and painting and poetry, not as the dirty Cinderella of worship as it is now but as the thing itself ."[EoK, p. 181]
Certainly,
several of these ideas were current among poets and painters in these years
from 1902 to 1913, and some of Williams’ concepts have roots that go back
farther than his first encounter with “sweet Ezra” (Williams’ endearment for
Pound expressed in The Autobiography),
but one cannot dismiss the impact of Pound upon Williams’ critical writings of
this period, and, particularly, upon what was to become the rallying-cry of
Williams’ poetics: “Nothing is good save the new” [Kora in Hell]. Observations such as those Williams makes in his Philosophical Essays—
"But shall we not find this freedom appearing under other names? …It is universal change, it is the new, it is that no two trees are alike, it is the thrill of surprise, mystery, the unaccountable against the accountable…. It is change, then, against the unchanged…" [EoK, p. 171]—
and in his chastisement of Harriet Monroe in 1913—
"Now life is above all things else at any moment subversive to life as it was the moment before—always new, irregular. Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal, let me say. I am speaking of modern verse. "[Selected Letters, pp. 23-24]—
clearly re-echo Pound’s statements expressed in The Spirit of Romance in 1910:
"Art is a fluid moving above or over the minds of men.
…
Let us consider the body as pure mechanism. Our kinship to the ox we have constantly thrust upon us; but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and, because this is less obvious—and possibly more interesting—we forget it.
We have about us the universe of fluid force, and below us the germinal universe of the wood alive, of stone alive…."
Indeed, Pound’s continual exhortation for a poetry that
functions as a “liberating force” [“The Wisdom of Poetry”], for a poetry
through which the poet can create experience anew, was quickly to become the
major issue of Williams’ aesthetics. Not surprisingly, Williams acknowledges in
I Wanted to Write a Poem that “Before
meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.”
Yet, on the
very next page of that 1958 text, Williams states what seems to be a contradiction:
“I was a listener. I always kept myself free from anything Pound said” [p. 6].
One may, a first, simply shrug off such a comment—which appears to be a
disavowal of Pound’s influence—as part of Williams’ endeavor to establish a
poetic identity separate from that of his mentor-friend’s, an endeavor that
began with his quoting of Pound’s letter in the 1920 introduction to Kora in Hell and with his criticism of
Pound in “Yours, O Youth” a few months later. But, by the late 1950s, when
Williams surely had sufficiently accomplished that dissociation, it seems
somewhat insincere of him to admit to the impact of Pound upon his life while denying
the influence of what Pound said—irrational almost, unless in his use of the
word “free,” Williams means something other than a disregard of or a
disconnection from Pound’s early poetics. If we explore this issue a bit
further, perhaps we can better comprehend why in 1958 Williams takes this
position.
Several of
Williams’ concepts of freedom—that it is inextricably connected with universal
change, which opposes it to the “unchanged,” “The old,” and the
“permanent”—have already been mentioned. In his early essay, “Constancy and
Freedom,” Williams further explores how those notions of freedom seem
diametrically opposed to the values of “persistency, solidity, permanency,”
opposed even to the constancy necessary for friendships and love [EoK, p. 170]. He goes to great lengths
to demonstrate that such an opposition between the two does not really exist—at
least in the abstract. The knowledge of our limitations and possibilities is
the “ultimate freedom,” Williams argues, and it is only in knowledge that a
human can be truly free. For knowledge or truth seeks to distinguish natural
laws—laws to which we are subject by ignorance; and, in that distinction, it
points to our human limitations, one of the most obvious of which is our
inability to explore all possibilities equally. Because of time and energy,
human beings cannot seek for truth in all its forms through all vocations;
recognizing the law of economy, knowledge teaches humankind the need for
constancy, which, when enacted, leads to the revelation of similar abstract
truths in each vocation. Thus, in theory, there can be no opposition between
constancy and freedom, since they result in the same knowledge. It is only
ignorance, Williams claims, that leads us to see these two forces as a duality.
As Williams restates time and again in his later work, however, humankind, as
the embodiment of that knowledge, wanders through “the forests of ignorance” [EoK, p. 64], unable to resolve the
duality and to live with the paradox.
Without giving
undue emphasis to Edith Heal’s records of Williams’ statements or the
philosophical musings of an adolescent poet, I suggest that it is in the
context of this paradox or tension between freedom and continuity in which we
must consider Williams’ accounts of Pound and of his relationships with his
fellow poets in general. Although Williams apparently comprehended that his
poetic development was dependent, in part, upon a contiguity and continuity of
personal friendships with poets—was dependent, if you will, upon contact—his aggrandizement of freedom
led him throughout his life to argue not only against the past and for renewal,
but to actively work against his own past, his friends, and their influence—to
detach himself from all that might preclude growth and divergence. Ezra Pound,
for Williams, was just such a force.
Certainly,
there were more aggravating opponents in Williams’ career. In 1920 he took on
Wallace Stevens in Kora in Hell,
addressing him as “dear fat Stevens,” and likening him (in a description
borrowed from Skipworth Cannell) to “a Pennsylvania Dutchman who has suddenly
become aware of his habits and taken to ‘society’ in self-defense.” And in the
same work, Williams begins what was to become a lifelong campaign against T. S.
Eliot [KiH, p. 24]—the whipping boy
of Pound and Wynham Lewis as well—that can be summed up in his 1958
reflections:
I had a violent feeling that Eliot had betrayed what I believed in. He
was
looking backward; I was looking forward. He was a conformist, with wit,
learning I did not possess. He knew French, Latin, Arabic, god knows
what.
I was interested in that. But I felt he had rejected America and I
refused to be
rejected and so my reaction was violent [IWTWAP, p. 30].
But the fact that he also sounds off in the Prologue
about his friends Hilda Doolittle and Pound should indicate that Williams’
gripes were not simply an evincing of “sour grapes" (the words Williams
chose to title the book of poetry he published in the following year), that he
was not just lashing back at his fellow poets for their criticism of his
poetry, but was responding to specific attitudes that belied their criticisms:
attitudes which he felt demanded a constancy—consistency of viewpoint (Stevens),
uniformity of language (H. D.), and continuation of the Tradition (Eliot)—which
translated in his thinking to arrestment and death. For Williams, reaction was
directly bound to his ideas on personal freedom, a phenomenon which he most
clearly reveals in his response to the letter from H.D.:
There is nothing in a literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll
write
whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please
and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it [KiH, p. 13].
Predictably,
his reactions to Pound are related to these very issues of change and freedom.
For Pound, according to Williams’ logic, had committed two major sins: like
Eliot, he overvalued the Tradition and he had abandoned his country to write.
To Williams these were inseparable issues; his lifelong commitment to primary
knowledge over authoritarian knowledge, to the modern over the Tradition, and
to the present over the past were grounded in his belief that such values were
peculiarly American; that American culture had made a necessary and irreparable
“break” with the classical valuation of education over knowledge [EoK, p. 146]. The American artist,
accordingly, cannot go to Paris to study art, Williams avers, because there he
can learn only French art; as an American, the artist can come to his own art
only through contact with his culture
and country. “France is France,” he wrote Harriet Monroe in 1913, “We are not
France” [SL, pp. 25-26]. Or, as he
put it in Contact 4:
Nothing will be forwarded, as it is persistently coughed at us for our
children to believe, by a conscious regard for traditions which have
arrived
at their perfection by force of the stimuli of special circumstances
foreign
to us, the same which gave them birth and dynamise them to-day [“Sample
Critical Statement/Comment,” Contact
4, 18].
By essay’s end,
Pound is linked with Eliot to those who Williams is soon to call the
“Traditionalists of Plagiarism,” those who would tell him to read Laforgue
rather than “believe in [his] bayonets” [see Williams’ “The Writers of the
American Revolution,” Selected Essays].
A few years later, Williams proclaims, “Ezra Pound is already looking backward”
[A Novelette in Imaginations, 54].
This reaction
against Pound, however, was not limited to such literal accusations, but found
more artful expression in Spring and All,
the document central to Williams’ early critical theory. For in the first half
of his pivotal work—a work which I read as a more-or-less coherent manifesto
rather than as a potpourri of poetry and prose—Williams chooses the most common
of poetic subjects: night, spring, and flowers, not to mention trees, wind,
clouds, rain, and war—the very subjects, in fact, which Pound ridiculed in his
letter to Williams of 1908:
Why write what I can translate out of Renaissance Latin or crib from the
sainted dead?
Here are a list of facts on which I and 9,000,000 other poets have
spieled
endlessly:
1. Spring is a pleasant season. The flower, etc. etc. sprout, bloom
etc. etc.
2. Young man’s fancy. Lightly, heavily gaily etc. etc.
3. Love, a delightsome tickling. Indefinable etc.
4. Trees, hills etc. are by a provident nature arranged diversely, in
diverse places.
5. Winds, clouds, rains, etc. flop thru and over ‘em.
6. Men love women….
…
7 Men fight battles, etc. etc.
8. Men go on voyages.
[Pound, Selected Letters, 4-5]
It seems
extraordinarily unlikely, after having accused Pound of being too reliant upon
the Tradition, that Williams should accidentally have taken up the subjects
which Pound argues are better copied than re-employed by modern poets. Rather,
it is apparent that in Spring and All
Williams confronts Pound on his own
turf, so to speak. For what Williams seems previously to have been unable to
convey to Pound—let alone to Stevens, Eliot, and the American reader—is that
his pursuit of the NEW—his focus on change as freedom—does not demand a break
with reality, the commonplace, or nature. To the contrary, as Williams comes to
perceive in Spring and All, spring,
love, flowers, trees, winds, clouds, war, and rain are subjects worthy of a
lifelong investigation. “Thank you, I know well that I am plagiarizing,” he
exclaims in the midst of his commentary in Chapter XIII [printed reversed], as if addressing his 1908 correspondent.
However, as Williams is soon to explain, what he means by plagiarism is something different from what Pound
argues. The confusion arose, Williams suggests, at least as far back as Samuel
Butler, who observed that “There are two who can invent some extraordinary
thing to one who can properly employ that which has been made use of before” [S&A, p. 97]. The Traditionalist of Plagiarism have seized upon this
statement, Williams argues, to proclaim the value of past traditions in
literature, which has resulted, he hints, in poets like Eliot and Pound looking
backwards and in a constant reference to the poets of the past, their metrics,
their rhetorical devices, their themes. Williams, on the other hand, would
retain the same subjects as past poets, but would endow them, through the imagination (the key word of Spring and All), with new life, a life
detached from that of the everyday world because it emanates not from nature
itself, or from an illusionary presentation of nature, but from an
emotionally-charged consciousness reflecting its existence from moment to
moment in nature. Pound, Williams
implies, has got it all wrong; the plagiarism does not lie in using the same
subjects, but in cribbing from “the sainted dead” (something Pound would do in
poetry throughout his life). While Pound argues in his 1908 letter for a manipulation
of past methods (“Sometimes I use
rules of Spanish, Anglo-Saxon and Greek metric that are not common in the
English of Milton’s and Miss Austen’s day,” [SL, p. 4] and against the use of timeworn subjects, Williams
contends in Spring and All that the subjects of the past can be revitalized,
but its methods are unusable because they do not permit the expression of the
modern poets’ imagination. As a subject for poetry, “The rose is obsolete,” he
tentatively admits, (and his conjunction is the pivot of the poem), "but
each petal ends in / an edge”… “so that
to engage in roses / becomes a geometry…” as polymorphic as the individual
personality [S&A, p. 107-108].
This
distinction between his own thinking and Pound’s is an important one, for it
recapitulates the same duality that Williams attempted to tackle in his early
essay on “Constancy and Freedom.” Obviously, Williams understood that Pound was
an ally in his struggle for a new poetry, for a freedom of poetic expression;
in his attachment to the methods of the Tradition, however, Pound could not but
have appeared to Williams as opting for constancy over freedom, to be electing
the European tradition over the American landscape and the predisposition of
its artists to remain separate, detached, even isolate. “My whole life,”
Williams summarizes in Spring and All,
“has been spent (so far) in seeking to place a value upon experience that would
satisfy my sense of inclusiveness without redundancy—completeness…with the liberty of choice” [italics mine, S&A, 116].
Williams
comprehended that, as a modern American poet, as a representative of the new
American poetics—in short, as a leonine abstraction—Pound stood for causes
similar to his own. Wrote Williams in 1919, two years before his attack on
Pound in Contact:
"I find matter for serious attention in Ezra Pound’s discordant
shrieking….
It is the NEW! not one
more youthful singer, one more lovely poem.
The NEW, the everlasting NEW, the everlasting defiance. Ezra has the smell of it. Any man can slip into the mud, Any man can go to school." [“Belly Music,” Others 5 (July 1919), 28].
From this perspective, in his vision of Pound as a
pioneer of American poetics, there was no question of influence. “Ain’t it enuf
that you so deeply influenced my formative years without your wanting to
influence also my later ones?” he asked Pound in a letter of 1954. But as a
fellow poet, as a living, breathing, speaking, shrieking being, Pound, like so
many others, was someone from whom Williams felt he had to free himself, was
someone against whom he had to fight to live in “A world detached from the
necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself, removed from him…with which he
has bitter and delicious relations and from which he is independent—moving at
will from one thing to another—as he pleases, unbound, complete” [S&A, p. 121].
Other books referred to in this essay:
William Carlos Williams Poems
(Rutherford, New Jersey: Privately printed, 1909)
Ezra Pound The Spirit of Romance:
An Attempt to Define Somewhat the Charm of the
Pre-Renaissance Literature of Latin Europe (London, J. M. Dent, 1910)
William Carlos Williams The
Tempers (London: Elkin Mathews, 1913)
William Carlos Williams Kora in
Hell: Improvisations (Boston: Four Seas, 1920)
William Carlos Williams Sour
Grapes (Boston: Four Seas, 1921)
William Carlos Williams The
Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1951)
Ezra Pound Selected Letters
1907-1941, Edited by D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1950)
William Carlos Williams, The
Selected Letters, Edited by John C. Thirwall (New York: McDowell,
Obolensky, 1957)
Williams Carlos Williams in conversation with Edith Heal I Wanted to Write a Poem (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1958)
William Carlos Williams The
Selected Prose: 1909-1965 (New York: New Directions, 1973)
William Carlos Wiliams The
Embodiment of Knowledge, edited with an Introduction by Ron
Loewinsohn (New York: New
Directions, 1974)
Philadelphia,
1983
Reprinted from Sagetrieb,
III, no. 2 (Fall 1984).
Presented as a talk on August 24th, 1983 at
the University of Maine, Williams Carlos Williams Centennial Conference.
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