144 PA RT T W O
rhymes.” She “followed the American idiom.” As for the bard who claimed
“I hear America singing, her varied carols,” Williams thanked Whitman for
breaking from European models—rhyme, stanza, pentameter—toward freer
rhythms, the ocean’s “measured sweep” at Coney Island in Brooklyn. “The
greatest moment in the history / of the American poem was when / Walt Whit-
man stood looking to sea / from the shelving sands.” But Whitman, whose free
verse could turn flaccid and garrulous, “to me is one broom stroke and that is
all.” The same letter dismissed Robert Frost ’s “bucolic simplicity”—which is a
gross simplification. Not that Frost, who twice snubbed Williams in Vermont,
wasn’t also vying for the inside lane in American poetry.
When The Waste Land came out in 1922, giving poetry “back to the academ-
ics” and sowing disillusion, Williams was already writing in his own vein. Al
Que Quiere, he titled an early book, “To whoever wants it,” thinking of a soccer
pass. Like Whitman and unlike Eliot, he caught the ordinary grace of people he
doctored, the young housewife “tucking in / stray ends of hair.” And of flowers
too. “Blueflags” takes his children to “where the streets end / in the sun / at the
marsh edge,” and among reeds they pluck fistfuls of wild iris
till in the air
there comes the smell
of calamus
from wet, gummy stalks.—calamus, whose bladelike leaves meant sexuality for Whitman. More and
more flowers show up in Williams’s verse, with the common vernacular names
he cherished: star-of-Bethlehem, spring beauty, Indian tobacco, heal-all, bone-
set. He wrote poems called “Primrose,” “Queen-Ann’s-Lace,” “Great Mullen,”
and “Daisy”:
The dayseye hugging the earth
in August, ha!whose “crisp petals remain / brief, translucent, greenfastened.”
That fresh eye animates a 1920 wake-up call for American verse that even
Williams’s detractors love. “To Waken an Old Lady” salutes his mother, then
seventy-three.
Old age is
a flight of small
cheeping birds
skimming
bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing