William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 203these lines: “It is not in the things nearest us unless transported there by our
employment. Make it free, then, by the art you have, to enter these starved
and broken pieces.”^7 The beauty is there, in the local, but only art can make
it free.These are words to remember as we pursue (with Williams) Beautiful
Thing in Book III of Paterson.
But if Paterson the man is an Odysseus figure (and the metaphor is
used on occasion, as at the end of Book IV), he is an Odysseus who travels at
home, his highest adventure a Sunday walk in the park, a dunking in the
ocean near the shore. Patersonis rigorously local, and only by so being could
it become American or universal: “The first idea centering upon the poem,
Paterson,came alive early: to find an image large enough to embody the
whole knowable world about me. The longer I lived in my place, among the
details of my life, I realized that these isolated observations and experiences
needed pulling together to gain ‘profundity’” (A,p. 391). But the “whole
knowable world” could not be embodied in a poem about the universe, the
globe, the country, but only about a specific locale: “That is the poet’s
business. Not to talk in vague categories but to write particularly, as a
physician works, upon a patient, upon the thing before him, in the particular
to discover the universal. John Dewey had said (I discovered it quite by
chance), ‘The local is the only universal, upon that all art builds.’ “ (A,p.
391). Paterson,then, conceived in these terms and with these purposes,
provides far larger boundaries for the imagination than the geographic. We
do not want to use the term “symbolic” because it was a term that Williams
avoided, condemned as a grasping after that universal without the local. But
neither do we want to mistake Patersonas providing locale for the purpose of
mere local color. Williams put it: “If it rose to flutter into life awhile—it
would be as itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world. For it is
in that, that it be particular to its own idiom, that it lives” (A,p. 392).
The basic form, the quest. Then what? After only a few pages into the
poem, the poetry is interrupted by fragments of prose—letters, historical
accounts, statistics, advertisements, recorded interviews, and so on—some of
them quite long, interrupting the poetic flow for several pages, or standing
at important junctures, as, for example, the eight-page letter at the end of
Book II. What kind of “poetry” can this be? In response to Wallace Stevens’s
suggestion that the prose passages were “anti-poetic,” Williams wrote:
All the prose, including the tail which would have liked to have
wagged the dog, has primarily the purpose of giving a metrical
meaning to or of emphasizing a metrical continuity between all
word use. It is notan anti-poetic device, the repeating of which