Then, too, consider the relation of line to stanza in “The Young House-
wife.” The poem’s twelve lines, ranging from ¤ve to nine syllables, are divided
into three stanzas of four, ¤ve, and three lines, respectively. Given the pur-
posely prosaic rhy thm of such lines as
/ || /\ / || / /\
Shy, uncorseted, tucking inwhose eight syllables carry only three primary stresses, broken by caesurae,
one wonders why Williams felt he had to group these irregular lines into
stanzas at all. I think there are two reasons. First, these are, in Hugh Kenner’s
words, “stanzas you can’t quite hear.... They are stanzas to see, and the sight
of them, as so often in Williams in®ects the speaking voice, the listening ear,
with obligations dif¤cult to specify.”^6 Then, too, there is a time gap between
each of the stanzas. In the space between stanzas 1 and 2, the young house-
wife makes her appearance. Between stanzas 2 and 3, the doctor driving by
¤nally makes eye contact with her. “Smiling” is the key word in this context—
the moment when she seems to ¤nally acknowledge the man’s presence—
although that too may be his imagination.
“Close reading” moves readily between such detail and larger cultural and
historical determinants. What was the role of wives in pre–World War I
America? What sort of decorum was observed between men and women,
and when was it violated? If we read “The Young Housewife” against Wil-
liams’s own short stories, poems, and autobiographical writing, a more com-
plex picture of the Rutherford scene emerges. Eccentricity, for example, was
wholly frowned upon, as we see in “Danse Russe.” Again, if we read “The
Young Housewife” against, say, the work of Williams’s friends Wallace Ste-
vens and Marianne Moore, we note a willingness to trace the curve of ac-
tual emotions and sexual fantasies that Stevens would have shied away from
and that Moore would have rendered in much more symbolic/allegorical
terms. Here class and gender considerations come into play, as do issues of
nationality when we read Williams against his expatriate friend Ezra Pound.
The young housewife is not compared to a Greek goddess or a ¤gure in a
Renaissance painting, and she is, signi¤cantly, never given a name, whether
realistic like Eliot’s Miss Helen Slingsby or fanciful like Stevens’s Nanzia
Nuncio. Rather, it is location that counts for Williams—the suburb, a word
that rhymes with the curb from which his housewife calls. And that suburb,
epitomized by the wooden walls of her husband’s house, acts to curb her very
activity.
Did British poets of 1916 write this way? And if not, why not? What his-
Introduction xvii