William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 201lines and the main themes of “Paterson: Episode 17”: “Beautiful Thing,”
detected in the form of a maid beating a rug, a comely girl with a mixed
sexual history who, in spite of violence and violation, retains a kind of
innocence and purity, her rhythmic action containing the beat of poetry
itself:
The stroke begins again—
regularly
automatic
contrapuntal to
the flogging
like the beat of famous lines
in the few excellent poems
woven to make you
gracious
and on frequent occasions
foul drunk
Beautiful Thing
pulse of release
to the attentive
and obedient mind.
(CEP,pp, 441–42)Inasmuch as Patersonis a poem portraying a quest for beauty, and specifically
Beautiful Thing, and particularly since in the long poem the poet finds
Beautiful Thing in essentially the same embodiment as he did in this 1937
poem, we might assume that by this year Williams had brought into focus an
important part of his epic’s scope and meaning. As fragments of “Paterson:
Episode 17” appear in Book III of Paterson(contrapuntally with the burning
of the library), the phrase Beautiful Thing takes on resonance and almost
visionary meaning—a meaning worthy of exploration in its proper place in
the poem.
Of Williams’s many works that might be cited as important milestones
on the road to Paterson,two prose volumes must be singled out for mention.
The first of these is In the American Grain (1925), an extraordinary
exploration of the American past through the accounts and histories of
America’s discoverers, explorers, founders, adventurers, warriors, leaders,
and writers. The cumulative picture is not a pretty one, and is filled with
cruelty and violence, as Williams permits many of the personages to
condemn themselves through their own incredible narratives—as, for