WILLIAMS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS 151A poet foisting passion onto wind and rain, let ’s say, “makes nature an acces-
sory... it blinds him to his world.” Anon knew this centuries ago, leaving the
link unspoken:
Western wind when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ! if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!Freeing poetry this way frees nature as well. Without fusing or confusing us
with the world outside, Williams brings it alive to us: “reality needs no personal
support but exists free from human action” (except, alas, as humankind weighs
in more and more). Behold, the work of imagination is “not ‘like ’ anything
but transfused with the same forces which transfuse the earth.” His bravest
claim!
Like Coleridge, he never lost faith in the priming force of imagination. It ’s
no surprise that “The Pot of Flowers”—
Pink confused with white
flowers and flowers reversed
take and spill the shaded flame
darting it back
into the lamp’s horn...—stems not from flowers but a friend ’s painting. Years later his last book cele-
brates Breughel, “The living quality of / the man’s mind” and the painter’s “co-
vert assertions / for art, art, art!” Poetic Imagination, capitalized by Coleridge,
mimicked divine Creation, and with secular American zeal, Williams claimed
as much. So much, even human survival, depends upon cleansing the way we
see and say things, wakening to the glisten of a red wheelbarrow.
Renewing contact with our world also meant declaring American indepen-
dence. As Spring and All came out, Williams began a year’s sabbatical from
medical practice to recover the continent ’s founding spirits: Eric the Red, Co-
lumbus, Ponce de Leon, Cortez, De Soto, Cotton Mather, on through Daniel
Boone, Sam Houston, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln. Days on days
in the New York Public Library gave access to their words and deeds, reshaped
in his own voice. The point was to “re-name the things seen... to draw from
every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of the life, nameless under an
old misappellation.” This book would be In the American Grain.
So he took his family for a six-month sojourn in Europe, personally encoun-
tering Joyce, Duchamp, Brancusi, Man Ray, Cocteau, also Pound and Heming-
way and H.D., pagan and Catholic Italy, monuments and ruins, architecture,