Modern American Poetry

(^266) Edward Hirsch
what Webster Schott terms “crisis books.”^37 Written in white heat, their
style is fervent, headlong, embattled, often obscure and contradictory,
sometimes radiantly clear and luminous. They are also the key books of
Williams’s early career, for they contain the basic premises of his mature
thought. They show him trying to create a platform for his evolving aesthetic
in prose even as he embodied that aesthetic in some of his most memorable
short poems.
Kora in Hellis a book of experimental prose poems, a culling of journal
meditations which Williams jotted down as a kind of automatic writing every
night for a year. Later he added comments and explanatory notes, many of
them equally dense and obscure. The title refers to the legend of Spring
captured and taken to Hades. As Williams recalled years later, “I thought of
myself as Springtime and I felt I was on my way to Hell.”^38 Inspired by
Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Kora in Hellis one of Williams’s most puzzling,
disjunctive, and surreal texts, a broken composition that continually defies
rational logic and coherence. Kora in Hellis a text divided against itself,
energetically trying to find an equilibrium, holding together two conflicting
forces and impulses. On the one hand, the improvisations are impromptu
and open-ended, asserting the freedom and primacy of the imagination.
They are fueled by what J. Hillis Miller calls an “anarchistic rage to demolish
everything, all logical or rational forms, all the continuities of history.”^39 The
destruction of received models and forms is necessary in order to clear a
space for spontaneous thought to arise. On the other hand, Williams’s
aesthetic asserts the primacy of treating objects in the world directly. Thus
his thought oscillates between process and the thing itself. Williams’s poetic
struggle involved finding an equilibrium between these opposing energies
and polarities. “Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive
that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great
pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest.”^40
Spring and All(1923)—first published by Robert McAlmon’s Contact
Publishing Company—is an experimental weaving together of poems and
prose manifestoes about poetry. It is, as Williams said, “a travesty on the
idea” of typographical form.^41 Chapter headings are printed upside down,
chapters are numbered in the wrong order. The poems are untitled. The
prose combines violent indictments of contemporary civilization and
impassioned pleas on behalf of the imagination. As Kora in Hellis a descent
into winter and hell, so Spring and Allis a difficult ascent into the radiance of
spring and the temporal world. The underlying subject of the book is the
hard necessity of creating “new forms, new names for experience.” In this