Modern American Poetry

(^196) James E. Miller, Jr.
The road from the 1914 “Wanderer” to the first Book of Patersonin
1946 is a long and open one, and it is not easy to assess the extent to which
Whitman was a camerado in arms. In his Autobiography(1951), Williams
freely confessed the unhealthy influence of Keats on his early poetry, an
influence that he was able to lay to rest rather quickly under the scathing
criticism of his friend Ezra Pound. But at the same time that he
acknowledged the obsessions with Keats, Williams said: “For my notebooks,
however (which I don’t think anyone ever saw), I reserved my Whitmanesque
‘thought,’ a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my head and my
heart from turgid obsessions” (A,p. 53). Of his first book of poetry, Williams
wrote: “The poems were bad Keats, nothing else—oh well, bad Whitman
too. But I sure loved them” (A,p. 107).
Although Keats seemed to drop out of Williams’s vocabulary rather
early without much problem, Whitman remained in it over the years, as a
focus of discussion or a point of reference. As early as 1917 Williams
attempted to disentangle Whitman’s significance for poetry and for him:
“Whitman created the art [of poetry] in America.... There is no art of poetry
save by grace of other poetry. So Dante to me can only be another way of
saying Whitman. Yet without a Whitman there can be for me no Dante.”
Whitman was the “rock,” the “first primitive,” and modern poets could not
“advance” until they had “grasped Whitman and then built upon him.” But
straight imitation was wrong: “The only way to be like Whitman is to write
unlikeWhitman. Do I expect to be a companion to Whitman by mimicking
his manners?”^2 The line that Williams established in this little essay was one
that he elaborated repeatedly in a variety of places. At times he was more, at
times less, critical of Whitman—in a way carrying on a love-hate relationship
not unlike that of Pound in his “Pact,” and seeing himself (as did the early
Pound) as one of Whitman’s “encrustations” to come in “ages and ages.” One
of the most interesting of Williams’s comments on Whitman came in that
strange, early book, Spring and All(1923), filled with some of Williams’s
finest early poems together with seemingly random comments on the art and
nature of poetry: “Whitman’s proposals are of the same piece with the
modern trend toward imaginative understanding of life. The largeness which
he interprets as his identity with the least and the greatest about him, his
‘democracy’ represents the vigor of his imaginative life” (I,pp. 112–13).
This aspect of Whitman was perhaps the most enduring in its impact
on Williams, in both his poetry and fiction. But it was Whitman’s technical
innovation that inspired Williams’s most extensive and complicated
commentary. In “Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist” (1939),
Williams identified Whitman as “a key man to whom I keep returning ...