Modern American Poetry

(^202) James E. Miller, Jr.
example, Cotton Mather does in his accounts of the witches of Salem in
chapters from Wonders of the Invisible World.Williams reveals something of
his purpose in the book when he records his reply to a question (in Paris) as
to why Americans don’t speak more often of the things he has just recounted
(much like the things of this book): “Because the fools do not believe that
they have sprung from anything: bone, thought and action. They will not see
that what they are is growing on these roots. They will not look. They float
without question. Their history is to them an enigma” (IAG,p. 113). If this
unromantic examination of the American past brought Williams closer to his
epic vision, his volume of short stories published in 1938, Life along the
Passaic River,brought him still closer. In the former book Williams located
himself as an American in time (in relation to the past); in the latter he found
himself in place (in relation to locality and the local). The stories of Life along
the Passaic Riverare sketches of ordinary, mostly humble people with whom
Williams has shared some experience in his role as family doctor delivering
babies and caring for children. Williams not only finds his material in the
locality where he lives and works, but he also finds his values there—material
and values that were to figure prominently in the epic then shaping.
3
Williams’s “long foreground” gave him time to work out, change, and
work out again many plans for Paterson,but his conception of a Mr. Paterson
seems to have endured from his first appearance in the 1927 poem. Paterson
is a shifting identity: the city, but also a man, everyman, modern man, a poet,
a doctor, and, of course, William Carlos Williams himself. If there is
ambiguity as to the “I” or speaker in the poem, it is no doubt intentional and
is in the tradition of ambiguity that Whitman established in Leaves of Grass,
where the “I” may be any one of a number of identities, not unlike many of
those Patersonassumes. Although the identity of Paterson may sometimes be
confusing when we first enter the poem, as we move into the later books the
speaker of the poem becomes more and more clearly identifiable as William
Carlos Williams. Like Leaves of Grass, Patersoncontains a great deal of
autobiography, all put in the service of the poetry.
Like other epics we are examining, the basic structure of Patersonis the
structure of the journey or voyage, the inner or spiritual quest in search of—
what? Knowledge? Awareness? Beauty? Language? All these, and perhaps
more. The opening lines of the poem’s “Preface” state bluntly: “Rigor of
beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty / when it is locked in the
mind past all remonstrance?” (P,p. 3). At one time, Williams had added to