Modern American Poetry

(^106) Thomas R. Whitaker
Shakespeare, “who had that mean ability to fuse himself with everyone which
nobody’s have, to be anything at any time.”^10
As a total construct—a series of shots through the material, with a self-
revising dramatic movement of descent into contact—this script
complements “Paterson.” Putting the two together and adding the projected
fiction about Dolores Marie Pischak and Fairfield, we can see that Williams
was approaching the mode of the later Paterson.An unpublished note of
October 29 makes clear that larger intent: “ALL that I am doing (dated) will
go in it. Poems. Talk of poetry. sequently IS it—from the way I look, it is
THIS I want. I shall use her [Dolores Marie Pischak], picking up all I can,to
the best of my power, but all the rest goes in strainlessly, without exclusion....
Paterson is really—part of it.”
And a note of November 13 relates that intent to the Shakespearean
vocation: “... and so I become her and everyone. My rocks, my trees, my
people, my self imagined part of everything. The name of everything, every
kind of grass, every kind of grimace speaking to me. And when that is—Then
roses will have cheap jewelry.”^11 That was the inclusiveness without
redundancy which now beckoned.
“Della Primavera Trasportata Al Morale,” the spring loosening of
1928 that followed the descent into winter, focuses on the natural and the
human with some of that inclusiveness. Its first poem, “April,” includes
responses to inner and outer weather, direct transcriptions of urban sights
and sounds (like those Williams had probably found in Louis Aragon’s Le
Paysan de Paris)—and also little vignettes, rhythmic studies of the language,
and semi-ironic translations of things into ideas. The most comprehensive
“moral” of this piece is “love, bred of / the mind and eyes and hands” (CEP,
60)—a love that is starved and deformed, imperfectly in touch. The poem’s
multifaceted structure results from the insight that “The forms / of the
emotions are crystalline” (CEP,64). But the larger structure and whiter heat
of Patersonwould be required adequately to support and fuse such disparate
elements.
More successful in this sequence are the shorter pieces, which present
what Marianne Moore has called “the breathless budding of thought from
thought.”^12 Three poems that emerged after “April” from the same long first
draft—“The Trees,” “The Wind Increases,” and “The Bird’s Companion”—
dissolve and reconstitute the poetic line as they seek immediacy. Here, as
Zukofsky said, we do not think of line-ends but of “essential rhythm, each
cadence emphasized, the rhythm breaking and beginning again, an action,
each action deserving a line.”^13