REVIVING AMERICA WITH WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 143A black, black cloud
flew over the sun
driven by fierce flying
rain.Though he realized rain doesn’t drive clouds, this instinctual beginning gave
Williams joy, crystallized his calling.
For a livelihood he took up medicine, working over forty years as an expert
and beloved general practitioner, tending to all sorts of people in Rutherford
homes and schools and in Passaic Hospital, delivering thousands of babies, lead-
ing community organizations. During the flu epidemic of 1918 he made sixty
house calls a day. Amid all this, over the years, he scrounged time to write—in
his office between patients and at home late at night: poetry collections, novels,
stories, translations, essays, plays, reviews, autobiography, and always letters.
“My family is prostrated—my patients are dying—I have not kissed my mother
for three weeks.” Zealous to regenerate American poetry, he wrote for many
magazines and started several.
“Make it new!” his comrade Ezra Pound declared, and Williams never tired
of doing so.
“Waken! my people, to the boughs green
With ripening fruit within you!
Waken to the myriad cinquefoil
In the waving grass of your minds!
Waken to the silent phoebe nest
Under the eaves of your spirit!”cries “The Wanderer” (1914), intoxicated with everything “so new now / To
my marveling eyes.” This youth merges with “The Passaic, that filthy river”
bearing him beneath its mud and stench “Into the crystal beginning of its days.”
A little later, T. S. Eliot would seek renewal in The Waste Land by setting off
London’s fouled river with a fluent verse from Spenser, “Sweet Thames, run
softly till I end my song.” The difference is that American-born Eliot went
back to Europe and a classic source, whereas Williams stayed local, in Walt
Whitman’s footsteps.
“To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet,” The Waste Land, “the great
catastrophe to our letters.” Williams felt “we were on the point of... a new art
form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit,” when Eliot expa-
triated. Though he himself had fed on Keats’s verbal music along with Shake-
speare ’s plays and sonnets, Williams drove his own agenda: to deal in American
material and idiom with homegrown rather than inherited wordcraft.
Emily Dickinson, “my patron saint,” had “succeeded by hammering her
form obstinately into some kind of homespun irregularity,” such as her “un-