William Carlos Williams is often sidelined as a poet’s poet for modernist snobs. In fact, he was a social poet whose democratic art was for the people.
The “brutality of the world has to be outgrown,” said William Carlos Williams in a late interview; “we outgrow it in our art.”1 William Carlos Williams, Interviews (1976). New Directions. A pediatrician who had lived most of his life in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams (1883-1963) was also one of the foremost literary innovators of his generation, known for the rough-grained immediacy and vernacular exuberance of his documentary aesthetic. For him, poetry lay scattered in the “back streets” of the industrial towns he worked in as a doctor-on-call, or cooped up in “the houses / of the very poor,” where people subsisted among “yards cluttered / with old chicken wire, ashes, / furniture gone wrong”: a jagged world on the margins of society, which nevertheless had the power, he said, to “astonish me beyond words.”2 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 1 (1986). New Directions. Introducing his 1944 collection, The Wedge, Williams suggested that his “interest in the arts” had “been extracurricular. Up from the gutter, so to speak,” and in a certain sense he was right: his aim had been to put literature in service to life itself, winnowing his verse from the vibrant clamor and dirt-stained actualities he encountered on his medical rounds.3 William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume 2 (1991). New Directions. “The good poetry,” he said plainly, “is where the vividness comes up true.”4 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1.
Later literary rebels would emulate Williams’s search for truth in the gutter, finding art in the teetering shacks and yawping back-alleys of a quotidian America customarily excluded from cultural representation. “Poems are bullshit,” Amiri Baraka would declare in 1965, “unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step”5 cit. James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2006). University of North Carolina Press. – a provocative formulation for “Black Art” and Black Power, which nevertheless echoed an earlier credo by his fellow Jersey troubadour, “no ideas but in things.”6 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. Both writers were dedicated to expressing the specificity and force of real experiences, which they attempted to enhance, in turn, by the shining attack of their words. “Saxifrage is my flower that splits / the rocks,” Williams had said, urging that “the writing / be of words, slow and quick, sharp / to strike […] sleepless.”7 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 2.
In his liner notes to Bob Dylan’s Songs of Redemption (1976), likewise, Allen Ginsberg aligned the political feist of Dylan’s protest song “Hurricane” with the cut-and-thrust pugnacity of Williams’s long poetic witness. The kindly doctor, he wrote, had been a people’s bard who “spent [his] life redeeming pure North Jersey language so later poets,” including Ginsberg himself, “could sing ‘tough iron metal’ talk rhymes.”8 Allen Ginsberg, “Bob Dylan’s DESIRE: Songs of Redemption.” Desire (1976). Columbia Records. Incensed by the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, Williams had excoriated the “judge too old to sit / on the bench” and the jury of “men already rewarded for / their services” to polite society, for the murderous verdict handed down. “No one / can understand what makes the present age / what it is,” he lamented, so long as they remained “mystified by certain / insistences.”9 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. With comparable anger, Dylan’s ballad in defense of the wrongfully convicted Rubin Carter turns the spotlight onto a political system rife with white supremacist biases (or “insistences,” to use Williams’s evocative term): “In Paterson that’s just the way things go / If you’re black you might as well not show up on the street / Unless you want to draw the heat.”10 Bob Dylan, The Lyrics: 1961-2012 (2016). Simon & Schuster. As Williams wrote in his 1928 collection, The Descent of Winter, “Someone should summarize these things / in the interest of local / government.”11 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. Poetry and democracy were jointly on the line.
This blend of political pluck and literary dynamism, the rain-sharp clarity of his social perceptions, marked Williams out from his contemporaries. “What is to be insisted upon,” sermonized T. S. Eliot, the Missouri-born expatriate, in 1920, “is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career,” absorbing “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer” onwards.12 Thomas Stearns Eliot, Selected Essays (1999). Faber. Williams was inveterately skeptical of such invocations of literary tradition: an abstraction that could be deployed all too easily, as he saw it, to perpetuate inherited assumptions concerning power and status in the wider culture. “Those who led yesterday wish to hold their sway a while longer,” he contended, fully the iconoclast, in 1923: “They have their great weapons to hand […] most dangerous of all, art.”13 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. Modernity demanded new expressive modes. The “roar, / the roar of the present,” he asserted in Paterson – this “is, of necessity, my sole concern.”14 William Carlos Williams, Paterson (1992). New Directions.
Younger artists would come to admire this combative streak in Williams’s writing – not least Denise Levertov, the poet and anti-war organizer, who in later life embraced a politics of Christian anarchism. For her, Williams was a “democratically expansive” literary exemplar in an often reactionary age. There was a “deeply felt ethical and emotional disharmony,” she suggested, “in the contrast between Williams’s love for the courage and ingenuity he perceived in the poor and disenfranchised,” on the one hand, and “the distaste with which the uneducated masses [were] presented” in the poems of Ezra Pound and Eliot, on the other.15 Denise Levertov, New & Selected Essays (1992). New Directions. The comparison is illuminating. Pound – who first met Williams as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania – saw in mass society only the “tawdry cheapness” of a “botched civilization,” leading him eventually to seek solace in fascistic fantasies of a revived Roman imperium under the stewardship of that new, bloated, black-shirted Caesar, Mussolini.16 Ezra Pound, Selected Poems (1957). New Directions. Williams, anti-authoritarian to his bones, was enthused by the sheer spunk and endurance of those working masses Pound disdained, bearing testament in his work to the intimate hardships they grappled with, day by day, year after year. “I never tire of the mystery / of these streets,” he wrote in “Approach to a City”:
the gulls wheeling
above the factory, the dirty
snow […]
trampled and lined with use17 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 2.
Williams was as much a social diagnostician as a landscape artist. His was a nature poetry not only transposed to an urban environment, but alert to the effects of labor and social poverty in the milieux he moved through, and on the lives of the patients he treated – some of whom, lacking cash, as his publisher James Laughlin recalled, “could only pay him with a / Sack of vegetables from their / Gardens.”18 James Laughlin, Remembering William Carlos Williams (1995). New Directions. Ever the relisher of small surprises (and blooming fruits), Williams, for his part, accepted such tokens gladly. “Doctors who practice medicine for money and not for humanity,” he remarked, “I particularly despise.”19 Williams, Interviews.
Such “humanity” was central to Williams’s creative practice. He not only investigated conditions in New Jersey’s factory-towns, but learned from the largely immigrant communities he found there. In “Fine Work with Pitch and Copper,” his snapshot glance of a building-crew – “resting / in the fleckless light” – is lit by an admiration for the skills they possess and the easy charisma of their bearing, even in idleness. “One still chewing / picks up a copper strip / and runs his eye along it,” the poem finishes.20 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. The worker’s dexterity in measuring the copper sheets comes to resemble the writer’s stripping down of each poetic line: a craftsmanship revealed, in both cases, by the most seemingly casual of movements. “[To] be an artist,” he proposed elsewhere, “is to be a kind of laborer – a workman – a maker in a very plain sense.”21 William Carlos Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974). New Directions. In saying this, one could argue, Williams was simply restoring to the word “poet” its original meaning. “It is the job of the workman-artist,” he contended, “to manufacture a better world than he sees.”22 William Carlos Williams, Interviews.
Time and again in Williams’s writing, moments of seeming repose or inertia are shown, instead, to be filled with gestural possibilities, an innate and growing proclivity towards change and motion. “We live in an age when matter generally is known to be just force frozen,” he was wont to declare, with the playful addendum, that is, “if Einstein knows what he is talking about.”23 William Carlos Williams, James E. Breslin, Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets (1985). New Directions. Even his most famous of credos, quoted above – “no ideas but in things” – becomes dynamic, when we recognise that the objects his poetic vision enfolded are rarely static. They bristle and fizz with energy – an energy drawn, very often, from the environments in which they appear. This is true alike of the “red wheel / barrow” lying in an urban yard patrolled, delightfully, by “white / chickens” after a passing rain-shower; of the “small house with a soaring oak / leafless above it,” ignored by every passerby but one; of the great “figure 5 / in gold / on a red / firetruck,” hurtling through the dark city.24 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. For Williams, noticing was not only a way of conferring value on the disregarded and disrepaired, but a means of establishing relationship with them. Seeing activates meaning: to be a poet, he seems to say, open your eyes.
Paradoxically, the sheer, presentational accuracy of Williams’s poems has frequently led critics to overlook their formal complexity and deep artistic roots. In attempting to pay homage to his working-class patients – gathering bright details and wild conversational scraps from the streets he walked and the crowded tenement-homes he visited – he was also reclaiming from the grip of an elitist literary establishment the egalitarian potential of lyric art, drawing an entire tradition of poetic imagining back onto the side of living people. For all his combativeness and stated modernity, he was an astute and consistent reviser of long-established literary genres. “Pastoral” thus skillfully revitalizes a Wordsworthian paradigm of social portraiture – written, as the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads puts it, in a “real language” shorn of poetical falsities and pretensions.25 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, & other poems, 1797-1800 (1992). Cornell University Press. Just as the English laureate’s “Old Man Travelling” begins with the “little hedge-row birds / that peck along the road,” apparently oblivious to the inscrutable title-figure tramping onwards, so Williams’s piece focuses on the “little sparrows” that “hop ingenuously / about the pavement,” noisily “quarreling / with sharp voices”, before panning to a wide-angle shot of an “old man” who “walks in the gutter / without looking up.” His “tread,” we’re told,
is more majestic than
that of the Episcopal minister
approaching the pulpit
of a Sunday.26 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1.
As the essayist William Hazlitt remarked of Wordsworth in 1825, his “Muse is a levelling one. It proceeds on a principle of equality.”27 William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, Or, Contemporary Portraits (1969). Collins. The same might be said of Williams’s aesthetic here.
Eavan Boland has described how over the course of the nineteenth century the revolutionary promise of English Romanticism gradually calcified, metamorphosing – under the influence of critics like Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot (again) – into something else entirely. The “concept of the poet became mixed with ideas of power,” she argued, which had “little to do with art and too much to do with a concept of culture shadowed by empire-building and conservative ideology.”28 Eavan Boland, A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (2012). Carcanet. In Williams’s deft handling, however, the “levelling” impulse that had animated the Romantic movement at its most radical is revived in a modern context. It was the poet Louis Zukofsky who first made the connection, detecting in Williams’s modernism, although “most indigenously of these States,” a fresh “beginning [of] perhaps a century of writing, as Wordsworth’s preface of 1800 began it in England.”29 Louis Zukofsky, “A” (2011). New Directions. The doctor-poet had made it new – by going back to his sources. “Such war, as the arts live and breathe by,” Williams wrote, “is continuous.”30 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 2.
Williams’s backward glances often served to open up new vistas of cultural understanding. The title-sequence from his final collection, Pictures from Brueghel, may be a case in point. Written during a period when his eyesight was declining, and when the very act of typing proved physically and mentally onerous, these late, ekphrastic poems journey immersively into the sixteenth-century peasant-world that Brueghel had documented. They also shine with a pathos and spontaneity that suggest genuine artistic identification on Williams’s part. In one section, a Christian “Nativity” scene, the fabled “Wise Men” arrive at the lowly stable, each of them bedecked in “stolen splendor”: interloping emissaries from an exploitative social order. Another, “The Corn Harvest,” depicts a peasant fieldhand “enjoying his / noonday rest / completely,”
sprawled
in fact sleeping
unbuttoned
on his back
the women
have brought him his lunch
perhaps
a spot of wine
they gather gossiping
under a tree
whose shade
carelessly
he does not share the
resting
center of
their workaday world
This is a vision of labor willingly deferred, productivity giving way to ease and convivial pleasure, as the very much un-Death-like “young // reaper” loafs in sunshine, savoring the summer.31 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 2.
Throughout the series, in spite of his own ailments, we find Williams keeping the faith he had always tended: that in the recurring rhythms of their days, ordinary communities might subvert the rules that bind them and reinvent their world – like the figures glimpsed in another piece, wracked by age and work, but nonetheless joyously hurling their bodies together in a wedding dance, “mouths agape / Oya! / kicking up their heels.” The Flemish painter “accepted the story” as he found it, “and painted / it in the brilliant / colors of the chronicler”: an art of and for the people, whose lives and deaths he witnessed, whose communal customs he affirmed. “Brueghel saw it all,” Williams continued, “and with his grim // humor faithfully / recorded / it.”
By deploying “the brilliant colors / of the chronicler” in his own portrait of the times, of course, Williams was also declaring his political and poetic allegiances. Over and over, as we’ve seen, his poems encompass the socially outcast and the culturally ignored, documenting the hardships and honoring the resilience of people without wealth or conventional status, living on the edge or out of view. Published in 1949 amid a burgeoning Red Scare concerning the supposed influence of Communist sympathisers over American public life, “Choral: The Pink Church” strikes an oppositional chord, setting out to sing into “holy” fellowship “the fool / the mentally deranged / the suicide”:
… beyond them all whine
the slaughtered, the famished
and the lonely –
the holy church of
their minds singing madly
in tune, its stones
sibilant and roaring –32 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 2.
If “this nightmare world explodes,” Allen Ginsberg would later say of the same post-war American society and its repressions, “it will all have been a dream with latencies, symbols, daydreams clairvoyant, and tiny perfect poems… full of intuition and unconscious prophecy” – an eerily familiar dreamscape that “Choral: The Pink Church” intuits in its own mode of ludic protest.33 Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays (2001). HarperCollins.
With a transcendent catalog of social, sexual, and poetic avant-gardes (“Poe, Whitman, Baudelaire… the saints / of this calendar”), Williams’s poem in fact anticipates the anguished majesty of Howl (1955) – Ginsberg’s rallying-cry for a “generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” channeling the hunger and yearning of America’s “angelheaded hipsters,” demeaned and criminalized, who wander through the “supernatural darkness” of the imperial republic “with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war.”34 Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems (2013). Penguin Books. Famously, and in a touching act of literary benediction, it was Williams who penned the introduction to the first edition of Ginsberg’s subversive masterpiece, praising its human courage and sheer, transgressive force of articulation. “Say what you will,” proclaimed the elder writer, Ginsberg “proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith – and the art! to persist.”35 Williams, Something to Say. Disarmingly boisterous as such comments may seem, the reality is that few, if any, of Williams’s contemporaries, faced with the work of an unknown young poet soon to be criminally prosecuted for obscenity, would have been equipped with the Whitmanesque generosity and insight his accolade displays – greeting Ginsberg’s path-breaking, counter-cultural vision with enthusiasm and respect.
As Denise Levertov observed, Williams was fired with a “love for tenacious life-force, for qualities of daring, imagination, persistence,” and for “humans” themselves, “obscure or known,” no matter.36 Levertov, New & Selected Essays. He stands today not merely as a documentary custodian of an increasingly distant era, but as an enabler of continuities: a living presence. The art of wit and witness, the intricate hopes and breathable revelations, the liberatory currents of modern American poetry – as incarnated in the works of Ginsberg and Baraka, of Kenneth Rexroth and Adrienne Rich, of Frank O’Hara and Levertov herself, among others – all have an origin in the zest and delicacy, the exploratory zeal and open affections of Williams’s poetic labors. To read his work is to feel the pulse of history alive again: in the textured flush of our senses, in the rhythm and guts of our own place and moment. A poem, he once declared, “can be made of anything, provided it be seen, smelt, touched, apprehended and understood to be what it is – the flesh of a constantly repeated permanence.”37 William Carlos Williams, Selected Letters (1984). New Directions. We return to his words and discover, with the thrill of sudden illumination, how the culture we make can renew the world we share – in its degradation and pleasure, its cruel “insistences” and soaring vitalities, its harsh pain and perennial flowering. As Williams knew, the struggle continues, so “long as there’s / a mind to remember / and a voice to / carry it on.”38 Williams, Collected Poems: Volume 1. ~
