Modern American Poetry

Introduction 11

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Poetic influence, an intensely problematical process, normally brings
together a strong poet’s earliest and final phases. Williams’s true precursor,
necessarily composite and in some sense imaginary, was a figure that fused
Keats with Walt Whitman. Such a figure has in it the potential for a serious
splitting of the poetic ego in its defense against the poetic past. The
“negative capability” of Keats sorts oddly with Whitman’s rather positive
capability for conveying the powerful press of himself. “Memory is a kind /
of accomplishment,” Williams wrote in “The Descent,” a crucial poem in his
The Desert Music(1954). The descent to dying beckons to a return of the
dead precursors in one’s own colors, even as Keats and Whitman beckoned
Williams to ascend into his own poetry. But the poem “The Descent”
Williams shrewdly quarried from book 2 of his own major long poem,
Paterson, a quarrying that suggests his pride in his own continuities.
Those continuities are massive throughout Williams’s best work, which
can be cataloged (against the numerous Williams idolators) as a limited yet
still remarkably diverse canon: Paterson(book 1), Kora in Hell, Spring and All,
“The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” “To Waken an Old Lady,” “The
Trees,” “The Yachts,” “A Coronal,” “These,” “The Poor,” “A Marriage
Ritual,” “Raleigh Was Right,” “Burning the Christmas Greens,” “A Unison,”
and the grand return of Keats-as-Williams in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.
The best lyrics and book 1 of Patersonare of a higher order, though
they also betray darker anxieties of influence than even Williams”s defiances
dared to confront. They display also another kind of agon, the anxiety as to
contemporary rivals, not so much Pound and Eliot as Wallace Stevens and
Hart Crane, heirs to Keats and to Whitman, even as Williams was. No two
readers are likely to agree upon just which shorter poems by Williams are his
strongest, but the one that impresses and moves me most is “A Unison,”
where the title seems to comprehend most of the dictionary meanings of
“unison”: an identity of pitch in music; the same words spoken
simultaneously by two or more speakers; musical parts combined in octaves;
a concord, agreement, harmony. Thomas R. Whitaker, one of Williams’s
best and most sympathetic critics but no idolator, gives the best introduction
to “A Unison”:

It is like an improvisation from Kora in Hell—but one with the

quiet maturity of vision and movement that some three decades

have brought.... As the implicit analogies and contrasts

accumulate, we discover (long before the speaker tells us) that we