Modern American Poetry

William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 209

the search of the poet after his language, his own language which

I, quite apart from the material theme, had to use to write at all.

I had to write in a certain way to gain a verisimilitude with the

object I had in mind.

Williams’s own intuitive way of working is suggested by his statement: “So
the objective became complex. It fascinated me, it instructed me besides.”
The concluding book then became a challenge:

And I had to think hard as to how I was going to end the poem.

It wouldn’t do to have a grand and soul-satisfying conclusion,

because I didn’t see any in my subject. Nor was I going to be

confused or depressed or evangelical about it. It didn’t belong to

my subject. It would have been easy to make a great smash up

with a “beautiful” sunset at sea, or a flight of pigeons, love’s end

and the welter of man’s fate. Instead, after the little girl gets

herself mixed up at last in the pathetic sophisticate of the great

city, no less defeated and understandable, even lovable, than she

is herself, we come to the sea at last. Odysseus swims in as a man

must always do, he doesn’t drown, he is too able, but,

accompanied by his dog, strikes inland again (toward Camden) to

begin again.^10

Book V of Patersonnever figured in the early planning of the poem, but
it was not long after the publication of Book IV in 1951 that Williams began
musing on the possibility of Book V. In 1953 he remarked to John Thirlwall:
“At first I didn’t have any plans. It ends with the river mingling with the
ocean. You come to the ocean and that’s the end of all life; that’s the end of
the river and the end of everything that concerns the river. But the fifth book,
well, you might logically say there shouldn’t be an end. But, as you recollect,
as you look back to find a meaning, nobody knows anything about death and
whether it is an end. It possibly isn’t an end. It’s a possibility that there’s
something more to be said.” In this same conversation, Williams remarked
of the earlier books: “It’s a man in his own life going through, not revealing
very much of his own life, but telling of the region which he’s inhabited for
a certain number of years and what it meant to him so far as it can be told.
Many things are to be inferred.”^11
Whatever Williams’s plans, and whatever his remembrance of Paterson,
the achieved poem escapes the outlines. As someone has said of linguistics—
all grammars leak. All the structures of any complex poem, even those of the