William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 205They provide, then, through their supreme particularity, much of the poem’s
reach for universality. In this way they resemble the long catalogs in Leaves
of Grass—those lists of items, persons, scenes, activities, thoughts, all of
which, by near-exhaustion of possibilities, convey the sense of totality: all of
life is included here, Whitman and Williams seem to say, and belongs here
and cannot be excluded, the poetic and the anti-poetic, the rational and the
irrational, the important and the trivial, the poetry and the prose of life.
Allied perhaps to this purpose of comprehensiveness is the attempt to
keep the poem close to reality—the real reality of life as daily experienced by
all of us. We have read such accounts, we have heard of such massacres, we
have talked of such sensational behavior, we have feared such violence, and
we have received or written such letters. We recognize the painful reality of
the exposures, and we perhaps squirm a bit in discomfort. Williams must
have thought: the poem in its poetry, at such length, is likely to wander away
from reality too easily (language is tricky, deceptive); the way to keep it near
things as they are is to have these periodic injections of prose, real prose,
taken out of my life as I live it in this place, from these people I know, from
these books I read, from these handbills I receive, from these statistics I
ponder. Some such reasoning, conscious or unconscious, we might imagine
on Williams’s part. And he might have thought, too, that since his theme is
importantly about language, the varieties of language introduced by the
prose would reinforce his theme in subtle ways. There is a wide range of
usage, tone, level in the language of the prose—nearly always jarring,
striking, or puzzling. There is language that is groping, language that is
inarticulate, salty language, stilted language, passionless and impassioned
language, language that cries and language that laughs—and it is all language
that brings to the reader the shock of recognition, of reality. Has the poem
drifted too far in its measured language? Then tear out a page from daily life
and stick it in to bring it back close to earth; the language will signal its
reality. And since the poet works intuitively, to his own rhythmic sense of
pacing—the prose appearing rhythmically spaced—there will be
reverberations, resonance, ironic echoes and reechoes. The theme is art or
poetry? Then the letters will be from artists and poets; the reader may test
the poem’s reality directly in its interwoven stream of quotidian reality in
subjects and themes openly or subterraneously related.
Such must have been some of the unformulated theory that lay behind
the prose passages. They are compatible—meld—with what is perhaps the
poem’s geographic centerpiece, the falls: “Paterson lies in the valley under
the Passaic Falls.” (Williams remarked of his choice of the city Paterson in
1951, “It has ... a central feature, the Passaic Falls which as I began to think