Modern American Poetry

(^214) James E. Miller, Jr.
prototype of the American dream. Somewhere, back in the past, in the
visionary planning of such as Hamilton, lies the cause of the wastes on
display on Sunday in the park.
There is one man in the park who speaks a torrent of words: Klaus,
the “Protestant! protesting—as / though the world were his own.” In
telling his story to the Sunday park strollers, he reveals himself the victim
of the American dream—victim in the sense that he came to America, made
the riches he dreamed of, and discovered in a visitation from “our blessed
Lord” that he was not happy. He followed the injunction to give away all
his money and found finally in his evangelism the way to happiness: “There
is no / end to the treasures of our Blessed Lord who / died on the Cross for
us that we may be saved” (P, p. 73). We no sooner read the “Amen” to
Klaus’s familiar revival sermon than we find ourselves in a prose passage
describing the Federal Reserve System in the U.S., a private enterprise that
creates money and lends it at high interest, forcing the people to “pay
interest to the banks in the form of high taxes” (P,p. 73). Usury, a familiar
theme from Ezra Pound’s Cantoshere divulged as lying obscurely behind
the ugliness of Sunday in the park: “The Federal Reserve Banks constitute
a Legalized National Usury System.” (P,p. 74). Klaus’s torrent of words
misses the economic reality. The people comprehend neither him nor the
system his mythology distorts and veils. The roar goes on, unattended,
uncombed.
The Library, in Book III, turns out to be the repository not of the
wisdom of the past, but of the cumulative horrors of history. Accumulated
newspapers reveal that the past is simply more of the present:
Old newspaper files,
to find—a child burned in a field,
no language. Tried, aflame, to crawl under
a fence to go home. So be it. Two others,
boy and girl, clasped in each others’ arms
(clasped also by the water) So be it. Drowned
wordless in the canal. So be it.
(P,pp. 97–98)
From newspapers Paterson turns to the books: “A library—of books!
decrying all books / that enfeeble the mind’s intent” (P,p. 102). It is soon
clear that the books do not contain the revelation for which the poet
seeks: