Modern American Poetry

(^204) James E. Miller, Jr.
piece of miscalculation makes me want to puke. It is that prose
and verse are both writing,both a matter of the words and an
interrelation between words for the purpose of exposition, or
other better defined purpose of the art.Please do not stress other
“meanings.” I want to say that prose and verse are to me the same
thing, that verse (as in Chaucer’s tales) belongs withprose, as the
poet belongs with “Mine host,” who says in so many words to
Chaucer, “Namoor, all that rhyming is not worth a toord.”
Poetry does not haveto be kept away from prose as Mr. Eliot
might insist, it goes along with prose and, companionably, by
itself, without aid or excuse or need for separation or bolstering,
shows itself by itselffor what it is. It belongsthere, in the gutter.
Not anywhere else or wherever it is, it is the same: the poem. (SL,
p. 263)
In the gutter?
Williams’s explanation verges on the irrational—a term that he himself
evoked in another attempt on his part to explain the prose insertions in
Paterson:
... one fault in modern compositions ... is that the irrational has
no place. Yet in life (you show it by your tolerance of things which
you feel no loss at not understanding) there is much that men
exclude because they do not understand. The truly great heart
includeswhat it does not at once grasp, just as the great artist
includes things which go beyond him.... The irrational enters the
poem in those letters, included in the text, which do not seem to
refer to anything in the “story” yet do belong somehow to the
poem—how, it is not easy to say. (SL,p. 309)
Here Williams seems to be as puzzled about the prose in Patersonas some of
his readers, who might take Williams’s reaction as an invitation to discover
their own rationale for the presence of the prose in the poem. In the first
place, the prose is a way of extending the poem beyond its poetic
boundaries—in the direction of the comprehensive. Elements are injected—
an Indian massacre, letters of a quasi-neurotic poetess, a handbill on social
credit—that extend the reach of the poem suddenly, forcefully, and with an
immediacy that would be hard to achieve in a rational introduction of the
subject into the verse. The prose pieces are all intensely “local” artifacts
whose grounding in feeling and passion, time and place, is indisputable.