Modern American Poetry

(^210) James E. Miller, Jr.
maker, leak: there are elements, depths, dimensions that escape the net.
Patersonmay be viewed as a sequence of stages on the way (an endless way)
to knowing. The dominant elements of each of the books then come to focus
in patterns and relationships that begin to make a whole:
Book I, “The Delineaments of the Giants”: blockage and divorce as
Paterson’s historical inheritance. The two most vivid examples, Sam Patch
(Noah Faitoute Paterson) who jumps to his death (in 1829) in the Genesee
River falls, his body later found in a cake of ice; and Mrs. Sarah Cumming,
recently married to the Reverend Hopper Cumming, who fell without a word,
probably deliberately, over the Passaic Falls in 1812. Appearing contrapuntally
with these two vivid and recurring images of language failure is the image of
an old National Geographicpicture of the nine women of an African chief, a
picture that speaks of something enigmatic in spite of its silence.
Book II, “Sunday in the Park”: the book of place—here; the shoddy and
the sordid; deformity and drunkenness. The Sunday walk in the park above
the falls presents a sequence of vignettes that might at first glance constitute
a wasteland of modern urban industrial life; Hamilton’s “great beast,” the
common people, in meaningless and purposeless Sunday relaxation and
torpor. There are two contrapuntal threads of action that vividly mark the
walk: a pair of lovers caught sleepily in their desire, frustrated, dozing; and
an itinerant minister who has given over all his riches in order to preach
salvation. The dominant prose injection of this book is the sequence of
letters from the anxiety-ridden female poet, and the book ends in a long
denunciation of Paterson by the poetess.
Book III, “The Library”: the book of time—now; the library’s stench,
purified by storm, fire, flood. As Book II was a walk in the park, Book III is
a walk in the past, through books. “The library is desolation, it has a smell of
its own / of stagnation and death” (P,p. 100). The contrapuntal theme is the
search for Beautiful Thing, found in a Negress beating a rug—far from the
environment or concerns of the books of a library. The prose passages inject
considerable violence, particularly historical accounts of the killing of
Indians (juxtaposed to Beautiful Thing).
Book IV, “The Run to the Sea”: “perverse confusions”; the Lesbian
poetess and Paterson vie for Phyllis in an ironic modern Idyl. Images of
blockage and divorce dominate—the atom bomb, Billy Sunday, usury,
violence (especially in the prose accounts of murder); but there are
contrapuntal themes, particularly in the account of Madame Curie’s
discovery of radium and in Paterson’s vigorous return from the “sea of
blood” (“the sea is not our home”) at the end and striding off inland with
refreshed spirit for a new beginning.