Modern American Poetry

(^200) James E. Miller, Jr.
what is going on about us we shall need some other means for
discovering it.
The epic poem would be our “newspaper,” Pound’s cantos are
the algebraic equivalent but too perversely individual to achieve
the universal understanding required. The epic if you please is
what we’re after, but not the lyric-epic sing-song. It must be a
concise sharpshooting epic style. Machine gun style. Facts, facts,
facts, tearing into us to blast away our stinking flesh of news.
Bullets.^6
When Williams wrote in the italicized epigraph to Paterson—“a reply to
Greek and Latin with the bare hands”—he was pitting his epic against the
long poems of Eliot and Pound; and throughout PatersonWilliams continued
his response to them (as at the end when Paterson rises from the sea they
followed to Europe and turns back to the land, Camden, and Whitman).
Although the first book of Patersonappeared in 1946, when Williams
was sixty-three, and other books appeared in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958
(when he was seventy-five; notes for Book VI were found at his death in
1963), some of the lines were written as early as 1914, in the poem “The
Wanderer,” when he was only thirty-one. From 1914 to 1958 is forty-four
years—a long time to live with a poem. And that thirty-two-year lag (a
minimal period, since we don’t have a complete record of Williams’s mind)
from embryonic idea to first execution surely constitutes the kind of “long
foreground” which Emerson detected behind Leaves of Grass on its
appearance in 1855. The 1939 comment quoted above (on the nature of the
“epic poem”) appears to have been made by a man who had long since
determined not only what constituted an epic but also that he was going to
write one. The first line from a strange prose piece entitled “Notes in Diary
Form” and dated 1927 flashes out to arrest attention: “I will make a big,
serious portrait of my time” (SE,p. 62). In 1927 Williams also published a
poem entitled “Paterson,” in which for the first time he introduces a Mr.
Paterson who has some of the aspects of a city (“Inside the bus one sees / his
thoughts sitting and standing” [CEP,p. 233]), and in which he reiterates:
“Say it, no ideas but in things” (CEP,p. 233). Both lines and ideas from this
poem ended up in the later epic: by 1927 the embryo had developed
recognizable features, but still had to wait out a long gestation.
In 1937 appeared “Paterson: Episode 17,” the very title suggesting a
long poem well along in progress, if not in fact at least in conception. If this
conception was to change considerably over the next nine years before the
publication of Book I, there would still be room in Book III (1949) for many