Modern American Poetry

(^208) James E. Miller, Jr.
Fourth,
the modern town, a
disembodied roar! the cataract and
its clamor broken apart—and from
all learning, the empty
ear struck from within, roaring.
(CLP,p. 11)
This early conception of the poem is clearly comprehensive at the same time
that it omits much vital to the finished poem. And if the plan for Part Four—
“the empty / ear struck from within, roaring”—was for some climactic
interior vision, the plan was not apparently fulfilled, until, perhaps, Part Five
with its vision of death as “a hole,” through which the “imagination / escapes
intact” (P,p. 212).
When Book I appeared in 1946, Williams wrote: “Part One introduces
the elemental character of the place. The Second Part comprises the modern
replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river
below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes—all that any one man may
achieve in a lifetime” (P,p. 1). The epigraph to Patersonsuggests seasonal
analogies: “spring, summer, fall and the sea” (P, p. 2). Writing on the
publication of Book III, Williams said: “From the beginning I decided there
would be four books following the course of the river whose life seemed
more and more to resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it:
the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below
the Falls, and the entrance at the end into the great sea.” Williams then
defined the poem’s structure in terms of a quest: “The brunt of the four
books is a search for the redeeming language by which a man’s premature
death ... might have been prevented. Book IV shows the perverse confusions
that come of a failure to untangle the language and make it our own as both
man and woman are carried helplessly toward the sea (of blood) which, by
their failure of speech, awaits them. The poet alone in this world holds the
key to their final rescue.”^9
In 1951, Williams reviewed his plans for Paterson,and confessed:
There were a hundred modifications of this general plan as,
following the theme rather than the river itself, I allowed myself
to be drawn on. The noise of the Falls seemed to me to be a
language which we were and are seeking, and my search, as I
looked about, became the struggle to interpret and use this
language. This is the substance of the poem. But the poem is also