Making It New: 1900–1945 379Paterson. Like so many American epics, Paterson is unfinished: Book One was
published in 1946, and Williams was still working on Book Six at the time of his
death in 1963. Long before he died, though, Williams had anticipated this. There
would never be an end to the poem, he explained, because it had to remain open
to the world of growth and change. This was something his epic shared with all his
work, and so too was its general approach; for, in its own way, Paterson is as much
concerned with a reverent investigation of the particular as Williams’s other poems
are. The basic particulars in this case are Paterson the town, an imaginative space
or place not unrelated to Rutherford, New Jersey, and Paterson the man who is, like
other protagonists in American epic, at once the poet himself and all people, all
democratic individualists. The two identities of Paterson are, in any case, related,
since from the very beginning of his career Williams had insisted that personality
was inextricable from place – that the human being and his activities were “an
extension of nature’s processes ... transfused with the same forces which transfuse
the earth.” “A man himself is a city,” declared Williams in his “Author’s Note” to
the poem, “beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the
various aspects of a city may embody – if imaginatively conceived.” To descend into
locality, in this case Paterson, was consequently also to descend into character; to
investigate the city, with the help of the imagination, was necessarily to investigate
the man.
The notion of “design,” however, is not so much a matter of subject as of form, the
terms in which this investigation is conducted. “To make a start, / out of particulars,”
Paterson begins,and make them general, rolling
up the sum ...
... rolling up out of chaos,
a nine months’ wonder, the city
the man, an identity ...
Rolling up, rolling up heavy with
numbers.In his later years, Williams was attracted by the example of the Bayeux Tapestry and
the paintings of Pieter Bruegel because in such works, he felt, great mosaics of life
were constructed out of a multitude of cherished particulars. Paterson, as he saw it,
was to be a verbal equivalent of such visual adventures. During the course of his
epic, Williams uses verse, prose, drama, dialogue, excerpts from books, letters,
interviews, anecdotes, history, and fable. Every experience recorded, every event or
person recreated, is studied closely, permitted the dignity of close attention. Yet out
of this conglomerate of individual moments and objects, Williams manages to
fashion a total pattern of meaning, a vision of life that draws its energy and its
coherence from the poet’s reverence for simple things, the pleasures, pains, and
dreams of ordinary people. “This is a POEM!” Williams insists cheerfully at one
point in Book Four. Paterson is that, although it should perhaps be added that itGGray_c04.indd 379ray_c 04 .indd 379 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM