A History of American Literature

Making It New: 1900–1945 377

urgent and intimate, as if the poet were speaking under the pressure of immediate

experience. And, having grabbed our attention, he then directs it to the object, the

young sycamore of the title, whose contours are caught in the curve, pitch, and sway

of the free verse line. The poem, like so much of Williams’s poetry, is packed with

tactile references: in a sense, the poet is trying to “touch” the tree and make us touch

it – to achieve contact (an important word for Williams) and, for a moment, live the

life of another thing. And similarly, typically, it is packed with verbs and verbals.

Williams, like Whitman, sees life as process, constant motion. As in a painting by

Van Gogh, there is a sense of the tree as animate life, thrusting toward the sky

and continuing to grow long after the artist’s imitation of it is finished. Not that, in

principle, it is ever definitively finished. Many of Williams’s poems do not really end,

they stop short without a full stop or even any punctuation mark. Sometimes, as in

“Young Sycamore,” the sentence that constitutes the poem is also left syntactically

incomplete. What the reader is left with, as a result, is a sense of possibility; as in

a poem by Whitman or Dickinson, there is, finally, the quiet reminder that every-

thing must remain open, in a world governed by change.

“The poem is made of things – on a field,” declared Williams. A statement like this

helps explain his patience and care with language. There is reverence for the

individuality of words in his poems, as well as of objects. And it alerts us to the

intense inner activity of his verse. Like a series of particles on a magnetic field,

the words in Williams’s poems insist on their status as separate entities, engaged in

an active relationship with their context. Individualism of word, object, and person –

it is a very American concept, and Williams was, in fact, among the most self-

consciously American of modern poets. This was not a matter of narrow nationalism.

It was simply because of his firm belief in the particular and local. “Place is the only

reality,” he insisted, “the true core of the individual. We live in one place a one time,

but ... only if we make ourselves sufficiently aware of it, do we join with others in

other places.” To be an individualist meant, for Williams, to attend to one’s individ-

ual locality, not to turn away from even its most alienating or inhibiting features

but to try to understand and achieve communion with it. The aim, Williams argued,

was not to “run out – / after the rabbits” as Pound and Eliot did, deserting American

nature in search of European culture. It was to stay as and where one was, as Poe

and Whitman had, to “return to the ground” in order truly to know the “new locality”

of America, the particulars of the here and now – which, in Williams’s own case,

meant his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey.

There was a potentially debilitating side to this approach to poetry, of which

Williams himself was well aware. Poems might resolve themselves into a series of

isolated instances, fragments that could not develop beyond the pressure of the

immediate moment nor comment beyond the demands of the singular experience.

One should not exaggerate this danger, of course. Even a poem written during

Williams’s “Objectivist period” like “Young Sycamore” is hardly imprisoned in its

occasion; and it is shaped by feelings of tenderness and generosity that suggest an

appropriate stance toward reality. Nevertheless, Williams clearly did begin to feel

that he wanted more opportunity to comment and a chance, too, to develop his

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