376 Making It New: 1900–1945a mix of cultures. Curiously, Eliot was never more of an American than when he
was reinventing himself as an Englishman – and never more of an American
writer than when he took that reinvention as his shaping narrative, his story.
Not that William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) would have agreed. When The
Waste Land was first published, Williams recalled in his Autobiography (1951), “I felt
that it had set me back twenty years.” “I’m sure it did,” he added. “Critically, Eliot
returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on the point of
an escape to ... a new art form ... rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.”
What Williams was disconcerted by was Eliot’s academicism: his commitment to
a complexly allusive, highly wrought poetics that dismissed the pleasures of the
local, the pressures of the particular and personal. Allied to this, what frightened
Williams was what he saw as Eliot’s fiercely articulated yearning for otherness:
for more traditional forms of culture, and stricter, more prescriptive codes of
being, than anything his American inheritance could supply. Formally and intellec-
tually, Williams believed, The Waste Land implied a rejection of its creator’s
birthplace. Inscribed in its subtext was a denial of the New World, both as a fact and
a possibility, imaginative space. And, for him, this was anathema. Born in Rutherford,
New Jersey, he spent time elsewhere in the United States and in Europe, studying
medicine and meeting poets, but he eventually returned to his birthplace to work as
a doctor there. And that movement back, not just to America but to one special
American locality, expresses his allegiances. For Williams was, above all, a poet of the
local, concerned with the specifics of a specific place. In Williams’s work, there are,
to quote a famous injunction of his, “no ideas but in things.” Attention is concen-
trated on the individual object or emotion or event, caught at a particular moment
in time and a particular point in space. The object does not stand for anything; it is
not a symbol, nor is there even a great deal of figurative language. Instead, the reader
is asked to attend to the thing in itself: its haecceitas or “this-ness” – what makes the
object or moment this and no other. Our yearning toward the abstract, what might
be, is quietly checked in Williams’s poems; and, instead, we are reminded of the
homely beauty of the actual, what is.
Williams, then, is the great populist in American poetry, for whom the world is a
democracy of objects. There are no hierarchies, no one thing is more important than
another, each is to be valued for itself. And there are no allegories: no one thing is to
be used as a tool, a vehicle to refer to another thing – it does not mean, it simply
exists. Whether it is a woman lamenting the loss of her husband as in “The Widow’s
Lament in Springtime” (1921), a natural object as in “Sea-Trout and Butterfish”
(1917), a strange moment of happiness as in “The Revelation” (1917), a street scene
as in “Proletarian Portrait” (1917), or an instance of intimacy as in “This Is Just To
Say” (1934), whatever it may be, Williams’s purpose remains the same: to emphasize
or identify with the thing, not just to describe it but to imitate it in words, to allow it
to express itself, to give it verbal shape, a voice. And the immediate consequence of
this is, not surprisingly, a commitment to free verse: rhythms that follow the shape
of the object and that respond to the exigencies of a specific occasion. “I must tell
you,” begins Williams in “Young Sycamore” (1934): the address is characteristicallyGGray_c04.indd 376ray_c 04 .indd 376 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM