William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 197tremendously important in the history of modern poetry” (SE,p. 218).
Whitman’s importance is dramatically identifiable: “He broke through the
deadness of copied forms which keep shouting above everything that wants
to get said today drowning out one man with the accumulated weight of a
thousand voices in the past—re-establishing the tyrannies of the past, the
very tyrannies that we are seeking to diminish. The structure of the old is
active, it says no! to everything in propaganda and poetry that wants to say
yes. Whitman broke through that. That was basic and good” (SE,p. 218).
But Whitman’s innovation, however remarkable, was beyond his own full
understanding: “Whitman was never able fully to realize the significance of
his structural innovations. As a result he fell back to the overstuffed
catalogues of his later poems and a sort of looseness that was not freedom but
lack of measure. Selection, structural selection was lacking” (SE,p. 212). In
brief, Whitman “broke the new wood”; now is the “time for carving” (as
Pound had written in “A Pact”).
By the 1950s, Williams’s view of Whitman as the great innovator who
somehow fell short of his own discoveries became a recurring theme, with
variations. In 1954: “Whitman was right in breaking our bounds but, having
no valid restraints to hold him went wild.... Whitman, great as he was in his
instinctive drive, was also the cause of our going astray. I among the rest have
much to answer for. No verse can be free, it must be governed by some
measure, but not by the old measure. There Whitman was right but there, at
the same time, his leadership failed him. The time was not ready for it. We
have to return to some measure but a measure consonant with our time and
not a mode so rotten that it stinks” (SE,p. 339). In 1955 (in “An Essay on
Leaves of Grass”): “Whitman’s so-called ‘free verse’ was an assault on the very
citadel of the poem itself: it constituted a direct challenge to all living poets
to show cause why they should not do likewise. It is a challenge that still
holds good after a century of vigorous life during which it has been
practically continuously under fire but never defeated.” Yes, but: “He had
seen a great light but forgot almost at once after the first revelation
everything but his ‘message,’ the idea which originally set him in motion, the
idea on which he had been nurtured, the idea of democracy—and took his
eye off the words themselves which should have held him.”^3 By the time
Williams wrote these comments, he himself was in process of exploiting the
new “variable foot” and “triadic line” which he had hit upon in the writing
of Book II of Paterson(1948).
Later, Williams’s view of Whitman became somewhat more expansive.
In an important little essay entitled “The American Idiom” (1961), he wrote:
“The American idiom is the language we speak in the United States. It is