380 Making It New: 1900–1945is a poem set firmly within the twin traditions of American epic and Imagist method.
“Unless there is / a new mind there cannot be a new line,” says Williams elsewhere,
in Book Two, “the old will go on / repeating itself with recurring deadliness.” Paterson
is a testament to that, as well: Williams’s life-long belief in the necessity of personal
experiment. Perhaps the final emphasis, though, should be on something else
characteristic of the poet that this great personal epic of his reveals: his sympathy, his
capacity for imaginative understanding. More than any other American poet of the
twentieth century, Williams was possessed of what Keats called “negative capability,”
the ability to bridge the gap between the perceiving subject and the perceived object.
For some reason, he was able to feel a sense of kinship with any particular thing, to
appreciate and to imitate its particularity – which makes him, after Whitman, the
finest American celebrant of the democratic impulse.
Of Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), Williams once wrote: “He was the well-dressed
one, diffident about letting his hair down. Precise when we were sloppy. But we all
knew, liked, admired him. He really was felt to be part of the gang.” The “gang”
included Marianne Moore and e.e. cummings; and, after graduating from Harvard,
Stevens moved to New York City and got to know them well. As Williams indicates,
however, Stevens was different. Born in Pennsylvania, his father was a lawyer; he
first studied and then practiced law in New York; then, in 1916, he moved to
Connecticut to work for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, becoming
vice- president of the company in 1934. He was a lawyer, a successful businessman,
but he was also a poet. Four of his poems appeared in Poetry as early as 1914. His
first collection, Harmonium, was published in 1923; and, although its relative lack of
success discouraged Stevens from further publication for some time, twelve years
later a second collection, Ideas of Order, did appear. And this was quickly followed by
a succession of volumes, among them The Man With the Blue Guitar and Other
Poems (1937), Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and Esthétique du Mal (1944);
a Collected Poems was published in 1954 and Opus Posthumous two years after his
death. What the poems collected in these volumes offer is a series of meditations on
the nature of reality; its relationship to human knowledge, human need, human
belief, and human art. Like many great artists in different fields during the earlier
twentieth century – like Joyce, for instance, or Picasso or Stravinsky – Stevens was
fascinated by the interplay between the mind and the world, particularly as that
interplay was expressed and explored in the different languages of literature, music,
and the visual arts. He was obsessed with what he called, in “The Idea of Order at
Key West” (1935), the “blessed rage for order”: the human desire for form and a
sense of meaning recovered, however temporarily, from the essential chaos of life.
And he made this – the struggle between word and world, mind and its surroundings,
the irrepressible search for belief and the irreducible concrete reality of things – the
source, subject, and inspiration of his work.
Another way of putting this is to say that Stevens believed, as did the great
Romantic poets, in the power of the imagination. Reality, Stevens felt, was not
something given to us, which our minds receive passively, but is on the contrary
something made, the product of an interchange between our minds and our givenGGray_c04.indd 380ray_c 04 .indd 380 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM