Modern American Poetry

Open to the Weather 97

“sense of inclusiveness without redundancy” (S&A,45, 42). All this, of
course, is anterior to technique, which can have “only a sequent value”
(S&A, 27).
The imagination exists as an integrating and liberating force, Williams
said, “to free the world of fact from the impositions of ‘art’”—that is, from
all past stylized apprehensions of experience—and thereby to free “the man
to act in whatever direction his disposition leads” (S&A,92). Understanding
that purpose, he found himself extending the values discovered in the
Improvisations (S&A,44). Specific clues to technique were at hand in analytic
and synthetic Cubism—especially in the work of Juan Gris, where Williams
saw “forms common to experience” caught up in a design which “the
onlooker is not for a moment permitted to witness as an ‘illusion’” (S&A,
11). That design not only adds to nature but also refreshes, the onlooker’s
attention to natural forms. Its disjunctions and overlappings, translated into
the modes of poetry, might render the swift movement of the mind from
point to point. However, the argument of Spring and Allis not a firm
commitment to a new mode of art; it is rather an important beginning in that
continual “beginning” which constitutes Williams’ esthetic. Certainly the
poems in this volume are not in any single new style.
“The Rose,” like “To a Solitary Disciple,” both states and enacts a
somewhat Cubist position; but the sentimentalism of the image is now more
radically abandoned for a novel geometric construction:

The rose is obsolete

but each petal ends in

an edge, the double facet

cementing the grooved

columns of air ...

This is not mere imitation of analytic Cubism. In the play on “ends,” one
level of statement wittily modulates into another. The first—abstract
assertion—reappears thereafter in disguise (“meets—nothing—renews /
itself”) or openly (“love is at an end—of roses”)—where another punning
modulation prepares for:

It is at the edge of the

petal that love waits

The dissolve after “waits,” like a more emphatic dissolve later on, renders on
a yet more immediate level the poem’s major theme: a renewal (of image, of