Modern American Poetry

(^96) Thomas R. Whitaker
artist: remote probing may degenerate into an unproductive self-refinement.
This poem is carefully balanced, from its opening antithesis (“in captivity”
and “godlike”) to the delicate oppositions in the closing lines:
he nods
the hair between his horns
and eyes matted
with hyacinthine curls (CEP,336f)
Though the bull is an “Olympian commentary” on the “bright pasage of
days,” the poem itself acts as implicit comment on that beautifully aloof, half-
blind, and “milkless” self-concern. It is in such negative ways that these two
poems point toward Williams’ next movement of growth, which had little in
common with the subtly Olympian academicism that he saw in Eliot’s The
Waste Land,published in this same year (Au,174).
Spring and All(1923), in its prose chapters, argues for a yet more radical
immediacy. If the imagination is to refine, clarify, and intensify “that eternal
moment in which we alone live,” we must destroy the barriers with which we
usually fend off “consciousness of immediate contact with the world” (S&A,
3, 1). We must reject all “beautiful illusion” in art, all “crude symbolism”
(S&A,3, 20), and even all “realism”—which is the mere copying of selected
surfaces from a conventionally given (and therefore subtly protective and
self-blinding) point of view. Any “conscious recording of the day’s
experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’” will make “nature
an accessory to the particular theory” the writer is following; it therefore
“blinds him to his world” (S&A,49). Because the realist is clinging to the past
(as source of material and method), he cannot freely attend to the present.
The resulting “reflection of nature” is not nature but “only a sham nature, a
‘lie.’” The true work of the imagination is “not ‘like’ anything but transfused
with the same forces which transfuse the earth.” The maker of such a work
does not “copy” nature but becomes it, “continuing its marvels” (S&A,51).
But what then is a presentprocess of composition? Williams offers
some suggestive notes: “Not to attempt, at that time, to set values on the
word being used, according to presupposed measures, but to write down
that which happens at that time—” Or again: “To perfect the ability to
record at the moment when the consciousness is enlarged by the
sympathies and the unity of understanding which the imagination gives....”
This recording of what is nowis “not ‘fit’ but a unification of experience”
(S&A, 48, 49). It is not “realism” but “reality itself”; it means the
abandonment of “acquisitive understanding” and a satisfaction of the