Modern American Poetry

(^104) Thomas R. Whitaker
following brief assertions (with unexpected shorter lines and a final sentence
fragment) carry unusual weight:
Somehow
it seems to destroy us
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off
No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car (CEP,270–72)
The vague phrases render the speaker’s own straining to perceive and
articulate. He too “cannot express.” But “isolate flecks”—with its reminders
of “isolate lakes,” “desolate,” “voluptuous water / expressing,” and the distant
image of deer—transcends that in-articulateness. And so does the final
colloquial metaphor. The imagination in this poem does not merely strain
after deer; it confronts our chronic and devastating blindness and
inflexibility.
In doing so, the imagination composes an utterance that exemplifies
Williams’ own definition of “style”: “There is something to say and one says
it. That’s writing. But to say it one must have it alive with the overtones
which give not a type of statement but an actual statement that is alive,
marked with a gait and appearance which show it to be the motion of an
individual who has suffered it and brought it into fact. This is style.”^7 Such
style is itself a witnessing and an adjustment.
III COLLECTEDPOEMS1921–1931
During the next decade or so—through the publication of Collected
Poems 1921–1931(1934)—Williams was seeking a more inclusive structure
that might render his sense of community and history, and also a new
loosening and a new precision of measure. These inquiries led him to devote
much of his energy to experiment with prose fictions, but his poetic
accomplishment during this period was considerable. The poems include
further oblique portraiture with social implications (“New England,” “All
the Fancy Things,” “The Dead Baby,” “Hemmed-in Males”), delicate
patternings of perception (“On Gay Wallpaper,” “The Lily,” “Nantucket”),