In the first three chapters we considered Williams's poetry with an eye to his disinclination to rest comfortably in three niches: those of son, family man and middle-class citizen. But his encounters with poetic tradition were also marked by fretfulness. These next three chapters examine the early poetry as Williams's amiable contention with the tropes, formulas and rhythms he encountered in such works as Palgrave's Golden Treasury. As in the first three chapters, we shall see Williams adopting a divided stance. On the one hand, he could not comfortably repeat the examples held up to him for emulation. On the other, his very grappling with received tradition can be read not as an outright rejection of tradition, but as a modification that instilled it with new vigor. In this chapter we shall look closely at certain traditional poetic topics that Williams handled: the lullaby, the metaphorical comparision of women with flowers, celebrations of spring, the love lyric, one's relation to great poets of the past and the obligation to speak in the “real language of men.”

Four Lullabies

One of the earliest indications of significant tinkering with received form comes in the first poem of The Tempers, “Peace on Earth” (CP1, 3). Williams begins that volume with a form more often associated with music than with poetry: a lullaby. But even if we grant that the lullaby is a legitimate genre for lyric poetry, the particular form that Williams embodies in “Peace on Earth” is most unusual.