New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  —an illumination reminiscent of Chardin’s still-lifes and his paintings of servants among their kitchen utensils (indeed parts of Proust’s beautiful essay on Chardin read like a description of this aspect of Williams); and though, as I first read him, this quiet and tender celebration deepened for me, as a great writer always does for his readers, some latent capacity in myself to see the world more freshly: yet my strongest sense of his vision, as I grow older, is of the way it encompasses the dark, the painful, the fierce.

  This is the time of year

  when boys fifteen and seventeen

  wear two horned lilac blossoms

  in their caps—or over one ear

  …

  They have stolen them

  broken the bushes apart

  with a curse for the owner—

  Lilacs-

  They stand in the doorways

  on the business streets with a sneer

  on their faces

  adorned with blossoms

  Out of their sweet heads

  dark kisses—…

  (Horned Purple)

  Williams’s fierce delight in the contradictions of life is not a passive acceptance, a kind of fatalism. He is anguished, he rails against stupidity and gracelessness and man’s inhumanity to man. “The Mind’s Games” is one of his little-known political poems; he writes in it that to a human being at a moment of ecstasy and completion, the world

  … is radiant and even the fact

  of poverty is wholly without despair.

  So it seems until there rouse

  to him pictures of the systematically

  starved—for a purpose, at the mind’s

  proposal….

  …

  Beauty should make us paupers,

  should blind us, rob us—for it

  does not feed the sufferer but makes

  his suffering a fly-blown putrescence

  and ourselves decay—unless

  the ecstasy be general.

  There are many other poems of his which, in differing degrees of overtness, are of political import; so pervasive was the historical sense in him that there is virtually nothing he wrote that does not—especially within the context of his work as a whole—have social implications. “In Chains” (from The Wedge 1944) seems to me one of the most interesting, and least known, of twentieth-century political poems:

  When blackguards and murderers

  under cover of their offices

  accuse the world of those villainies

  which they themselves invent to

  torture it—we have no choice

  but to bend to their designs,

  buck them or be trampled while

  our thoughts gnaw, snap and bite

  within us helplessly—unless

  we learn from that to avoid

  being as they are, how love

  will rise out of its ashes if

  we water it, tie up the slender

  stem and keep the image of its

  lively flower chiseled upon our minds.

  It has, however, a flaw of logic: he poses as choices, (1) to bend to their designs, to go along with the system and be a party to its crimes; (2) to buck them; (3) to neither buck them, that is, struggle in rebellion against their designs, nor become complicit, but suffer ourselves to be trampled while inwardly—helpless—our thoughts gnaw at us; or (4) to learn “from that”—i.e., apparently from the equal negativity of the first three alternatives—to “avoid being as they are.” The lapse in logic occurs when Williams fails to develop a definition of what “bucking them”—resistance—might be and why he is treating it as a negative. It cannot be because he sees it has small chance of succeeding; Williams consistently manifested a love of “pure grit,” putting a high value on boldness, daring, a refusal to resignedly anticipate defeat. He loved generosity, and was moved not by the ingenious prudence of Ben Franklin but by the rash and adventurous Aaron Burr. The shad making their way “unrelenting” upstream, the two starlings landing backward, facing “into the wind’s teeth,” are images central to Williams; and one finds throughout his work variations on that theme of defiance—as, for example, in the little poem that forms part one of the three-part “A History of Love”—

  And would you gather turds

  for your grandmother’s garden?

  Out with you then, dustpan and broom;

  she has seen the horse passing!

  Out you go, bold again

  as you promise always to be.

  Stick your tongue out at the neighbors

  that her flowers may grow.

  Is it then, as the fourth choice implies, that resistance without keeping the image of love’s “lively flower chiseled on our minds” is self-defeating, because a struggle uninformed by love and compassion makes of the rebel a mirror image of the executioner—the ultimate irony of co-option? This is what it means to me—and I like to think Williams, though he was never a political revolutionary (except in the implications of much of his work) and was rather repelled than enthused by the left-wing politics of his day, meant it to convey to the reader that meaning I attribute to it. But the way in which he lets the syntax slide him past “buck them” without defining qualification deflects some of the impact. It is a flaw of form, of form considered as revelation of content, not as something imposed upon it, and which should therefore not stop short of all possible lucidity consonant with not oversimplifying. Not seldom Williams, in the prose as well as the poetry—or perhaps oftener, indeed, in prose—gives inadequate attention to detail, fails to follow all the way through, as if he were in too much haste to get on to the next matter. This may have been the price paid for his amazing productivity as an artist even while leading to the full the busy life of a doctor. Given the wealth and vigor of his artistic output, I have always found petty and unresponsive to the point of absurdity the caviling of those critics who have loftily characterized him as “lacking in intellectual force” and so on. He had in fact a sweep and depth of original intellectual insight. If one takes a close look, what gave a handle to even his sympathetic, “favorable” critics when they dismissed him as “even less logical than the average good poet … an ‘intellectual’ in neither the good nor the bad sense of the word” (Randall Jarrell) or as a man whose “pronouncements on poetry and poetics are almost never of such a quality as would force us to take them seriously” (Hyatt Waggoner) was not the invalidity of his concepts (and certainly not the absence of concepts, as some anthologists who try to reduce him to a sort of witless imagist miniaturist would have one suppose), but simply the occasional impulsive abandonment of a piece of writing before checking out all of its nuts and bolts. In its positive aspect this can be regarded as a manifestation of his largeness, his boldness, in contrast to the compulsive perfectionism of many a smaller, less fertile imagination, though it results in a good deal of frustration for his admirers.

  But in speaking of his vision as encompassing the darkness, wildness, fierceness of life as well as celebrating the ordinary. I’m thinking not only of his political/historical/social understanding, his grappling with America, his constantly taking up the challenge to deal with his time and place, but also of the deep and equally pervasive sense of loneliness and strangeness I find in his poetry. The fairly early “Lighthearted William” “twirls his November moustaches” and sighs “gaily” (this delightful poem has a certain kinship with some of Stevens’s short poems), but the world on which he looks out is the’same “fearful” one of the even earlier “Winter Sunset,” where

  Then I raised my head

  and stared out over

  the blue February waste

  to the blue bank of hill

  with stars on it

  in strings and festoons—

  but above that:

  one opaque

  stone of a cloud

  just on the hill

  left and right

  as far as I could see;

  and above that


  a red streak, then

  icy blue sky!

  It was a fearful thing

  to come into a man’s heart

  at that time; that stone

  over the little blinking stars

  they’d set there.

  Nowadays Williams is “taught” in the colleges and presumably widely read—but what does this teaching and reading amount to? I am constantly meeting people who have been taken, bewildered, on a tour of Paterson without any reference to The Wanderer, the early poem in which so many clues to the understanding of Paterson are embedded (which is in fact one of those early works in which the whole subsequent development of an artist is shadowed forth prophetically), and equally without reference to the rest of his work except for the tiresomely familiar and basically unrevealing anthology “specimens,” such as “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “The Yachts.” Or else they have read some of the really late poems—“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” perhaps—again with no sense of what led up to them during a whole lifetime. I don’t mean to imply that “Asphodel,” for example, does not very firmly stand as a work of art on its own supreme merits; nor that a student eighteen or nineteen years old has not the ability to respond to it; but surely few readers of any age are likely to receive Williams most rewardingly by beginning with a poem whose content is a summing up, a testament prepared for by a whole lifetime of other work, and whose formal structure has likewise grown slowly out of a long development, a long history of experimentation and exploration. A strictly chronological approach is not necessary; it is often fascinating and revealing to read concurrently works from different periods of any writer’s life; but a tendency in the formal study of Williams—even among individuals reading him of their own free choice—has been a reverse chronology that does not even lead all the way back to the beginnings but leaves readers ignorant of all the earlier work except for the small selection Randall Jarrell edited.* Few students are brought to recognize, and rarely discover for themselves, the high degree of his relevance to contemporary concerns, to the daily questions of “how to live, what to do” that they have such a hungry need to ask and answer and for which they are given (in the childhood and student years) so poor a provision for doing so.

  How different Williams, re-explored, is from the stereotypes too often presented even by his supposedly sympathetic critics. These stereotypes give the impression of a poet of inadequate intellectual underpinnings, essentially prosaic—a leveller who, determinedly democratic, pulled language down from lyric heights; they imply that a reader hungering for illumination rather than information, for numinous song rather than flat, if precise, statement, or for challenging ideas rather than depictions, had best look elsewhere.

  One can indeed find information and statement in his poems, and many instances of isolated or assembled reportages, consciously and deliberately undertaken, sometimes as exercises (he never ceased training himself to listen to the rhythms of common speech), sometimes as parts of an “ideogrammic,” Poundian construction (the prose quotations in Paterson can be perceived as Williams’ adapution of Pound’s method of demonstration by documentary collage rather than by authorial discourse). And those elements of his work have their own value. But there is so much more to him!—more music, more magic, more duende. Perhaps “soul,” in the Afro-American sense, is the closest approximation to the word duende, which a standard Spanish dictionary translates merely as “elf, hobgoblin, ghost.” It was soul that, as Garcia Lorca tells in his famous essay on the duende, the famous Flamenco singer lacked as she sang with such skill, but which fired her later as she flung herself, hoarse and strident, into the song beyond song. Williams’ not very well-known poem “The Sound of Waves” suggests a whole exploratory poetics, leading to such goings-beyond—beyond the brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed, beyond facile closures. It is a poem not so much about poetry as about experiencing the creative venture: the poet-voyager comes to that place where he asks himself the eternal human/artistic question, “How to proceed? How, and where, do I go from here?” Williams moves by a process of elimination towards an image in which the mist, rain, sea-spume of language is blown against jutting rock, and by the encounter is changed, as if the impact shocks the vague drift of inchoate words into granite utterance. It is as if for every projection and crevice in the rock a converse crevice and projection takes substantial form in the mist. But that transformation (brought about by a confrontation with a level of reality arrived at in the course of the questing journey—a reality that may be the recognition of mortality) is perceived by the voyager as the journey’s end only for a long moment. There is a line of dots across the page—and then the dynamic of exploration resumes, not as further movement across a space but as a deepening of listening attention in the place to which movement has brought it:

  …

  Past that, past the image:

  a voice!

  out of the mist

  above the waves and

  the sound of waves, a

  voice speaking!

  It is a poem that, starting dubiously with the question, “A quatrain? Is that/the end I envision?” propels itself from point to point, awkward and hesitant at first, then picking up speed and direction, pulling the reader along with it to a place where (by shared revelation, not by exposition) it is discovered that an end can—or must—precede a beginning. (Who would have expected to find such consonance between Williams and Eliot!) Beyond and above known image, known sound, there opens to us the prospect of the poem beyond the poem….

  The poetics implied by “The Sound of Waves” is not a matter of applied metrics but of following through the metamorphic stages of experience with a persistence that is open to whatever may befall. It risks the abyss, it endures the cloud of unknowing, it yields itself to fiery light. Doc Williams, shrewd, practical, skeptical, as some admirers see him and as he liked to present himself (even to himself, was at the same time a poet [“I am, I am a poet”—he repeats in “The Desert Music") with all of the archetypal poet’s resemblance to the archetypal mystic.

  “The Sound of Waves” embodies a poetics inseparable from the rest of human experience and—not because of its content but by its very nature, its forms, its sensuous forms that are its very essence—expresses and defines the nature of humanness; and in so doing arrives at the edge of the world, where all is unknown, undefined, the abyss of the gods. From there at last, beyond the human,

  a voice speaks.

  Like most artists of large scope and complex substance, Williams cannot be narrowly categorized as Apollonian or Dionysian, classic or romantic. His lifelong concern with structure and technique, his insistence on the need for “measure,” a certain aristocratic elegance of gesture in the turn of phrases, the impeccable completeness and brevity of countless “little” poems, the tone of controlled passion, austere, sober, solemn, we hear tolling in the very late long poems—these could be called Apollonian. But if the Apollonian form-sense is the bones of an art, the intuitive, that which is pliant, receptive—but not docile!—rather abandoning itself fiercely, recklessly, to experience—is the flesh and blood of it, and this is Dionysian. As a young man he committed himself to the Muse; She had cried to him,

  … “Haia! Here I am, son!

  See how strong my little finger is!

  Can I not swim well?

  I can fly too!” And with that a great sea-gull

  Went to the left, vanishing with a wild cry—

  But in my mind all the persons of godhead

  Followed after …

  and he responded with the realization that,

  I know all my time is forespent!

  For me one fact is all the world!

  (The Wanderer)

  —the face of a Muse who is both wild gull and godhead, “marvelous old woman” and “horrible old woman; mighty, crafty, feared and beloved.” The reader who would know Williams must know his diversity and experience the plunge of the understanding into his frightening dep
ths.

  * * *

  * In 1985 a more comprehensive Selected Poems, edited by Charles Tomlinson, superceded that volume.

  Written in 1972 and delivered as an Elliston Lecture at the University of Cincinnati in the spring of 1973.

  The Ideas in the Things

  (1983)

  THERE ARE MANY MORE “ideas” in William Carlos Williams’ “thing” than he is commonly credited with even today; and this is true not only of Paterson and the post-Patersonian, clearly meditative poems in triadic lines, but also of a great deal of his earlier work. Because he did write numerous poems that are exercises in the notation of speech or in the taking of verbal Polaroid snapshots, it is assumed that many other short-or medium-length poems of his are likewise essays in the non-metaphorical, the wholly objective. And because he said (in his introduction to The Wedge, 1944), “Let the metaphysical take care of itself, the arts have nothing to do with it,” it is forgotten that he immediately added: “They will concern themselves with it if they please.” It is not noticed that he himself frequently did so please. Williams, for much of his life, did take on, it is true, the task of providing for himself and others a context of objective, anti-metaphysical aesthetic intent in order to free poetry from the entanglement of that sentimental intellectualism which only recognizes the incorporeal term of an analogy and scorns its literal, sensuous term. This view denies the equipoise of thing and idea, acknowledging only a utilitarian role for the literal (as if it were brought into existence expressly and merely to articulate the all-important abstract term), rather than perceiving concrete images as the very incarnation of thought. This view insults the imagination, for the imagination does not reject its own sensory origins but illuminates them, and connects them with intellectual and intuitive experience. Williams, working against that insult to imagination, needed to assert a confidence in the actuality and value of observable phenomena as well as a recognition of the necessity of sensory data to the life and health of poetry. But by so doing he incurred much misunderstanding from his admirers (not to speak of his detractors) and, I suspect, endured a good deal of (mainly unacknowledged) inner conflict; for he was frequently obliged to betray his stated principles in favor of the irresistible impulse toward metaphor, which is at the heart of poiesis.