William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 1992But before attempting to fathom Williams’s meaning here (“It is up to
us ... to continue” the theme which Whitman “had only begun”), we must
trace in outline the emergence of Williams’s Paterson.For this, two other
poets are of considerable importance. If Whitman was a poet with whom
Williams connected and of whom he felt himself a continuation, the
expatriates T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the latter a lifelong friend) constituted
poets against whom he felt himself in reaction. There is no need here to trace
out the relations in detail—these have been illuminatingly explored in Louis
Simpson’s Three on the Tower^5 —but Williams’s strong feelings against some
aspects of their poetry shaped his own ideas of Paterson.Williams came to
view The Waste Landas “the great catastrophe to our letters” (A,p. 146), and
he wrote with passionate intensity of his memory of the poem’s publication:
Then out of the blue The Dialbrought out The Waste Landand
all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb
had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown
were turned to dust.
To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once
that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically
Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt
that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to
the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which
should give it fruit. I knew at once that in certain ways I was most
defeated.
Eliot had turned his back on the possibility of reviving my
world. And being an accomplished craftsman, better skilled in
some ways that I could ever hope to be, I had to watch him carry
my world off with him, the fool, to the enemy. (A,p. 174)Although Williams’s relationship with Pound was much more complex
(as, for example, note Williams’s appreciative review of A Draft of XXX
Cantos[1931]), his reservations about Pound’s epic were deep. He wrote in
1939:The truth is that news offers the precise incentive to epic poetry,
the poetry of events; and now is precisely the time for it since
never by any chance is the character of a single fact ever truthfully
represented today. If ever we are to have any understanding of