Its Poets” is a case in point. In the case of “The Young Housewife,” it surely
helps to know that each morning, Dr. Williams, a busy pediatrician, left his
house at 9 Ridge Road in suburban Rutherford, New Jersey, and headed for
his of¤ce, proceeding, later in the day, to make house calls and hospital calls
that naturally involved a good deal of driving. Poems were something he
wrote on the run, between patients, generally leaving a page in the of¤ce
typewriter and composing a verse or two when he had a free moment.
There is currently much speculation about Williams’s love life. By his
own admission, in poems like “Asphodel that Greeny Flower” and the Auto-
biography, he had his share of affairs, but for obvious reasons they had to
be highly circumspect: Williams was a married man, the father of two sons,
in a small suburban town. There are indeed poems that allude to speci¤c
incidents—for example, poem I X in Spring and All, with its address to a hos-
pital nurse: “O ‘Kiki’ / O Miss Margaret Jarvis / The backhandspring” (Col-
lected Poems 1 200). But “The Young Housewife” is written in the third per-
son, its tone one of bemused, clinical detachment. The title itself suggests
that the woman in question is one the poet barely knew, someone he merely
saw ®eetingly on his daily drive to the of¤ce.
Williams’s poem has none of the dif¤cult references and allusions we ¤nd
in Pound or Eliot; there seems to be nothing to “look up.” Indeed, the New
Critics found Williams’s poetry so “®at,” so prosaic, that they dismissed it
as inferior to the poetry of Robert Frost or Hart Crane. But the references
that were obvious to Williams’s contemporaries may now be as obscure as
Pound’s Chinese ideograms or references to Eleusis in The Cantos. In the
twenty-¤rst century, the ice-man and ¤sh-man are no longer familiar ¤gures.
Was there really a time when people did not have refrigerators and hence
needed to have a block of ice delivered to their homes? When the milk-
man delivered the requisite quarts every morning? And when the ¤sh-man
delivered fresh ¤sh on demand? Williams’s reader needs to know that in the
early twentieth century, home delivery—now pretty much reserved for the
newspaper—was the order of the day. The calling of the ice-man and ¤sh-
man is thus simply part of the housewife’s morning routine. Or take the
phrase “as I bow and pass smiling” which my students found unrealistic. In
1916 men routinely wore hats outside their homes, and when they greeted
someone, especially a lady, they inclined their heads slightly and doffed their
hats. It is a scene played out in any Humphrey Bogart or Fred MacMurray
¤lm you care to see.
Inevitably, then, we cannot separate a close reading of the poem from at
least some reading of the poet’s culture. In another well-known Williams
poem, “Danse Russe” (1916), the poet tells us that it’s his inclination, “when
my wife is sleeping / and the baby and Kathleen / are sleeping,” to retire to
xiv Introduction