Modern American Poetry

(^198) James E. Miller, Jr.
characterized by certain differences from the language used among cultured
Englishmen, being completely free from all influences which can be summed
up as having to do with ‘the Establishment.’ This, pared to essentials, is the
language which governed Walt Whitman in his choice of words. It
constituted a revolution in the language.” Williams asserted that the
revolution is continuing, and the modern reply to the “fixed foot of the
ancient line” is “the variable foot which we are beginning to discover after
Whitman’s advent.... Whitman lived in the nineteenth century but he, it
must be acknowledged, proceeded instinctively by rule of thumb and a tough
head, correctly, in the construction of his verses. He knew nothing of the
importance of what he had stumbled on, unconscious of the concept of the
variable foot.”^4
It is clear from these scattered comments on Whitman that Williams
felt affinities and at the same time felt the necessity of declaring his
independence; after all, in his drive to discover the new, Williams could not
give over his allegiance totally to any poet of the past—not even Whitman.
But there is one more significant comment on Whitman to be noted. In all
of Paterson,Whitman’s name is not to be found (except in one of the Allen
Ginsberg letters—“I do have a whitmanic mania & nostalgia for cities and
detail & panorama and isolation in jungle and pole, like the images you pick
up”) (P,p. 213). But Williams goes out of his way to inject Whitman’s name
in a brief commentary on Patersonat the end of his Autobiography.Williams
published what he assumed to be then the final book, Book IV, of Paterson
that same year (1951): the poem fulfilled his plans as publicly announced and
he saw it as finished. His brief comments in his Autobiography,in the final
chapter entitled “The Poem Paterson,” are mostly of a general nature, but
one of the few paragraphs turns almost interpretive: “In the end the man
rises from the sea where the river appears to have lost its identity and
accompanied by his faithful bitch, obviously a Chesapeake Bay retriever,
turns inland toward Camden where Walt Whitman, much traduced, lived
the latter years of his life and died. He always said that the poems, which had
broken the dominance of the iambic pentameter in English prosody, had
only begun his theme. I agree. It is up to us, in the new dialect, to continue
it by a new contruction upon the syllables” (A,p. 392). This is a remarkable
comment, hardly to be derived from the poetic text itself, but clearly earnest
and almost defiant (earlier in the passage Williams addresses his critics); at
this critical final (final as of 1951) moment in his poem, Williams’s
imagination evokes Whitman—as Pound had done in Canto 82, as Crane
had done in Part IV of The Bridge.