Modern American Poetry

(^216) James E. Miller, Jr.
me out! (Well, go!) this rhetoric
is real!
(P,p. l45)
Whitman always declared that his rhetoric was of the flesh: “Camerado, this
is no book, / Who touches this touches a man.”^13
Book IV, which was once thought to complete Paterson,pleased almost
nobody, and even Williams felt moved to add another book. No doubt a major
reason for the critical displeasure with the book is the dominance of the
language of chaos, with vignettes and images of perversion, sexual frustration,
violence and death. Readers have not known how to interpret the opening
section, portraying a Lesbian poetess vying with Dr. Paterson for the sexual
favors of a beautiful nurse. Critics have tended to be more condemnatory
morally than Williams himself, who commented: “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.”^14 Clearly Williams did not
intend the episode in an Eliotic sense—sexual perversion as emblematic of
moral and spiritual perversion. His sympathies for all the frustrated participants
come through the long sketch, and his admiration for the girl shines brightly in
the poetry. What has not been much noticed about the narrative is its mixture
of languages. The poetess in the “Idyl” is a creature out of the library of Book
III, her version of reality framed by poetic visions from the past, classical or
modern; she forces her life into the unreal form of a pastoral, and she writes
Phyllis a poem with lines that even she recognizes from Yeats. Paterson, too,
sees his experience with Phyllis framed in an Eliotic vision: “Oh Paterson! Oh
married man! / He is the city of cheap hotels and private entrances” (P,p. 154).
As he departs from a rendezvous, he remembers that there is something he
wanted to say—“but I’ve forgotten / what it was. something I wanted / to tell
you. Completely gone! Completely” (P, p. 154). The only entirely genuine
language in this frustrated triangle is the language of the down-to-earth letters
that Phyllis writes to her alcoholic father, reeking with a refreshing reality that
points up the phoniness of the rest: “Look, Big Shot, I refuse to come home
until you promise to cut out the booze” (P,p. 150).
Book IV presents other images of chaos, images of the atomic bomb, of
“the cancer, usury,” and of violence. Perhaps the most impressive of these are
the prose accounts (in Part Three) of several murders, one the story of a young
man killing his own infant daughter when “her crying annoyed him,” and
another the story (1850) of one John Johnson, a sometime hired hand (an
inverse of Robert Frost’s), who killed his former employer and wife, and then
“was hung in full view of thousands who had gathered on Garrett Mountain and