Introduction 13you remember, with a grove of gnarled
maples centering the bare pasture,
sacred, surely—for what reason?Williams does not know whether he can or cannot say the reason, but
the allusion is to Keats’s characteristic, Saturnian shrine in Hyperion. For
Williams it is “a shrine cinctured there by / the trees,” the girdling effect
suggested by the natural sculpture of Keats’s shrine. Where Keats as the
quester in The Fall of Hyperionpledges “all the mortals of the world, / And all
the dead whose names are in our lips,” and where Whitman insists, “The
smallest sprout shows there is really no death,” Williams neither salutes the
living and the dead nor folds the two into a single figuration. Rather, he hears
and urges us to: “Hear the unison of their voices.” How are we to interpret such
an imaginative gesture? Are we hearing more, or enough more, than the
unison of the voices of John Keats and Walt Whitman? Devoted Williamsites
doubtless would reject the question, but it always retains its force
nevertheless. It is not less true of The Waste Landthan it is of Williams. Eliot
revises Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by fusing it
with Tennyson (among others, but prime among those others). Image of voice
or the trope of poetic identity then becomes a central problem.
Whitman once contrasted himself to Keats by rejecting “negative
capability” and insisting instead that the great poet gave us the “powerful
press of himself.” Admirable as Patersonis (particularly its first book), does
even it resolve the antithesis in Williams between his “objectivism” or
negative capability, and his own, agonistic, powerful press of himself? Paul
Mariani ends his vast, idealizing biography by asserting that Williams
established “an American poetic based on a new measure and a primary
regard for the living, protean shape of the language as it was actually used.”
J. Hillis Miller, even more generously, tells us that Williams gave us a
concept of poetry transcending both Homer and Wordsworth, both Aristotle
and Coleridge:
The word is given reality by the fact it names, but the
independence of the fact from the word frees the word to be a
fact in its own right and at the same time “dynamizes” it with
meaning. The word can then carry the facts named in a new form
into the realm of imagination.Mariani and Miller are quite sober compared to more apocalyptic
Williamsites. Not even Whitman gave us “a new measure,” and not