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William Carlos Williams and the Efficient Moment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Cecelia Tichi
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Extract

In the face of William Carlos Williams's achievement in Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain (1925), Paterson (1946–58), and The Desert Music (1954), among other acclaimed works, readers must find it inconceivable that the young and poetically misguided Williams could have continued to labor at the genteel verse of his medical-school and interning years (1906–9). When a growing number of distinguished critics find Williams's place in twentieth-century poetics to be “revolutionary,” it seems pointless even to imagine the young Williams perennially separating his life from his vague “ideals” of beauty and ethical purpose, and thus going on to become, in maturity, another Joyce Kilmer. To date, scholars of Williams's early work, especially James Breslin and Rod Townley, have revealed the psychological change by which Williams's repressed self became free “to re-enact fully the process of release and reformation that Whitman had started” and have shown, as well, that between 1909 and 1919 Williams underwent an “agonizing process of cultural divestment” as he gradually shed his belief that poetry was a sacred trust of moral idealism and noble purposes couched in truth and beauty. Sloughing off his post-Victorian ways, and immersed in the responsibilities of marriage, mortgage, parenthood, and medical practice, Williams seems inevitably to have been prepared to “weld his artistic and psychological allegiance to the cult of experience.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 267 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

NOTES

1. See three essays by Miller, J. Hillis: “William Carlos Williams,” in Miller, J. Hillis, ed., Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1966), pp. 285–359Google Scholar; “Williams's Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” Daedalus, Spring 1970, pp. 405–34Google Scholar; “Introduction,” in Miller, J. Hillis, ed., William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 1–14Google Scholar. See also Riddel, Joseph N., The Inverted Bell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. xixGoogle Scholar, and Mariani, Paul, William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics (Chicago: American Library Association, 1975), pp. 199, 201.Google Scholar

2. Breslin, James E., William Carlos Williams: An A merican Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 20Google Scholar; Townley, Rod, The Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 63.Google Scholar

3. Townley, , The Early Poetry, p. 68.Google Scholar

4. See Breslin, , chaps. 1 and 2 (“The Quest for Roots,” “Williams and the Modern Revolt”)Google Scholar. See also Dijkstra, Bram, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Guimond, James, The Art of William Carlos Williams (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), pp. 54–62, 93–107Google Scholar; Weaver, Mike, William Carlos Williams: The American Background (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Whittemore, Reed, William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 92–136.Google Scholar

5. Mariani, , William Carlos Williams, p. 185.Google Scholar

6. Breslin, , William Carlos Williams, p. 64.Google Scholar

7. Williams, William Carlos, The Great American Novel, in Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 13.Google Scholar

8. See Miller, , “Williams's Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” p. 413.Google Scholar

9. Spring and All, in Williams, , Imaginations, p. 89.Google Scholar

10. See Whittemore, , William Carlos Williams, p. 85.Google Scholar

11. Williams, William Carlos, Collected Earlier Poetry (New York: New Directions, 1966), p. 32.Google Scholar

12. Williams, William Carlos, The Autobiography (New York: New Directions, 1951), p. 60.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., pp. 286–89, 356–62.

14. Ibid., pp. 76–105, 3.

15. Paul, Sherman, The Music of Survival (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968), pp. 43, 44.Google Scholar

16. Williams, William Carlos, I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Heal, Edith (New York: New Directions, 1958), p. 87.Google Scholar

17. Williams, William Carlos, The Build-up (New York: New Directions, 1952), p. 191.Google Scholar

18. See Williams, William Carlos, Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1954), pp. 64, 188, 66Google Scholar; Williams, , Autobiography, pp. 359, 361.Google Scholar

19. Quoted in Mazzaro, Jerome, “Preface,” in Mazzaro, Jerome, ed., Profile of William Carlos Williams (Columbus, Ohio: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. iii.Google Scholar

20. See Boorstin, Daniel J., The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 363–66.Google Scholar

21. Quoted in Drury, Horace, Scientific Management: A History and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), p. 168.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., pp. 105, 112.

23. See Haber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 51–74.Google Scholar

24. Ibid., pp. 57–58; see also Kakar, Sudhir, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), p. 176.Google Scholar

25. Loewinsohn, Ron, “Introduction”Google Scholar to Williams, William Carlos, The Embodiment of Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1974), pp. xxii–xxiii.Google Scholar

26. Williams, , Embodiment of Knowledge, pp. 179, 186, 189.Google Scholar

27. Thirwall, John C., ed., The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

28. Quoted in Rothenberg, Jerome, ed., Revolution of the Word (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. ix.Google Scholar

29. Williams, , Embodiment of Knowledge, pp. 178–80Google Scholar; “Pastoral” (Al Que Quiere), in Williams, , Collected Earlier Poems, p. 121.Google Scholar

30. Williams, , Embodiment of Knowledge, pp. 26, 38, 53Google Scholar; Williams, , Selected Essays, pp. 128, 268–69Google Scholar; Williams, William Carlos, A Voyage to Pagany (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 116.Google Scholar

31. McAlmon, Robert, “Concerning ‘Kora in Hell,’” Poetry, 04 1921, pp. 54–59Google Scholar; Moore, Marianne, “‘Kora in Hell,’ by William Carlos Williams,” Contact, Summer 1921, pp. 5–8Google Scholar; Zukovsky, Louis, “American Poetry, 1920–1930,” Symposium, 01 1931, pp. 60–84Google Scholar. Reviewing Williams, 's Sour Grapes (1921)Google Scholar, Kenneth Burke wrote, “There is the eye, and there is the thing upon which the eye alights; while the relationship existing between the two is a poem.” See “Heaven's First Law,” The Dial, 02 1922, pp. 197–200.Google Scholar

32. Williams, , Autobiography, pp. 359, 361.Google Scholar

33. Williams, , The Build-up, pp. 333, 334.Google Scholar