William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” 215The place sweats of staleness and of rot
a back-house stench. a
library stench
(P,p. 103)Paterson realizes that the books “cannot penetrate and cannot waken, to be
again / active but remain—books / that is, men in hell, / their reign over the
living ended” (P,p. 115). In the midst of this awareness, one of the most
violent of the prose inserts relates the story of the torture and murder of
innocent Indians by American colonists, witnessed by “leaders” who “stood
laughing heartily at the fun” (P,p. 102). The reader muses: where are the
books in this library that reveal the reality of this American pioneer past? By
the time the tornado strikes, followed by the fire and the flood, the reader
yearns with Paterson for the cleansing of the past to make way for a new
beginning.
Book III concludes with some of the most Whitmanian lines of
Paterson.Unlike Eliot and Pound, very much like Emerson and Whitman,
Paterson learns from the Library experience—The past above, the future below
And the present pouring down: the roar,
the roar of the present, a speech—
is, of necessity, my sole concern.
(P,p. 144)Whitman put it this way in his 1855 Preface: “The direct trial of him who
would be the greatest poet is today. If he does not flood himself with the
immediate age as with vast oceanic tides ... and if he be not himself the age
transfigured ... let him ... wait his development.”^12 Paterson seems
determined to be the Whitmanian poet:
I cannot stay here
to spend my life looking into the past;the future’s no answer. I must
find my meaning and lay it, white,
beside the sliding water: myself—
comb out the language—or succumb—whatever the complexion. Let