195Williams is part of the great breath of our literature. Paterson is our
Leaves of Grass.
—Robert Lowell, “William Carlos Williams”1
In the poem that stands first in his Collected Earlier Poems,in Whitmanesque
lines that Williams first published in 1914, he says:
But one day, crossing the ferry
With the great towers of Manhattan before me,
Out at the prow with the sea wind blowing,
I had been wearying many questions
Which she had put on to try me:
How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?
(CEP,p. 3)^1The “she” of these lines, “old, painted— / With bright lips,” looks startlingly
like a descendant of Whitman’s muse which he discovered “install’d amid the
kitchen ware!” The ferry on which Williams rides in these lines may not be
Whitman’s Brooklyn ferry, but it conjures up some of the same kinds of
poetic vision.
JAMES E. MILLER, JR.How Shall I Be Mirror to This Modernity?:
William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson”
From The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman’s Legacy in the Personal Epic.© 1979 by
The University of Chicago.