Twentieth Century American

Literature

Survey Course Instructor:

Mihai Mndra

Lecture 6
Modernist Poetry
Ezra Pound: A Retrospect, In a Station of a Metro, The
Cantos (I).
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow, Paterson;
Prologue to Kora in Hell.
Wallace Stevens:The Emperor of Icecream, Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird, The Idea of Order at Key West.
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers,, Mother to
Son, The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain (excerpts).

American Modernist Poetry Summary

William Carlos
Williams

Ezra Pound
Modernity
T. S. Eliot,
New Critics

High Modernism
Aestheticist rejection
of modernity
Classicism
The Poet as part of the Elite
More or less overt
support of fascist ideologies

Wallace Stevens

Active engagement with both European

high culture & American everydayness
Active engagement with modernity
The poet as a seer / visionary
Experimentalism
Democracy

Ezra (Weston Loomis) Pound

(1885 1972)

E. Pound, 1913

E. Pound, 1970s

Ezra Pound (1885 1972)

born in Hailey, Idaho, United States

1908: settles in London; meets William
Butler Yeats (his secretary for a while),
Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme
(Imagism), among many
1920: moved to Paris
1924: moved to Rapallo, Italy
World War II: supported Mussolinis
government; publicly against the
American involvement into the war; Axis
propaganda speeches on Italian radio
1945: turns in to U.S. forces; to be stand
charges of treason; kept in a cage for 25
days in Pisa the Pisan Cantos
Insanity plea: St. Elisabeth Hospital
(1946 - 1958)
1949: Pisan Cantos won the first
Bollingen Prize from the Library of
Congress.

Imagism
Anglo-American movement developed in the preWorld War II years

Critical reaction against the poetry of the

immediate past in England and America:
As subjective, impressionistic
As decadent Romanticism

Both typical of the Victorian era (Imagist opinion)

sources of inspiration were, chronologically, of two

sorts:
Ancient: Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Chinese, and
Japanese
Modern: French.

Imagism
Not all imagist poets were affected by the same
literatures
each poet was the product of a particular
combination of sources, and the chief source varied
with the individual.
Yet the platform on which the imagists eventually took
their stand was a harmonious structure based on
these principles:
Hardness of outline
Clarity of image
Brevity
Suggestiveness
Freedom from metrical laws.

Imagism
FRENCH ORIGIN SCHEMA:
Parnassianism (against Romanticism; for
materialism; the Word not ideas)
Symbolism (more spiritual)

NATIVE ORIGINS
1908: Thomas Ernest Hulme founded the Poets
Club, and although none of the poets who became
officially the imagists were members of this early
group, it was at its meetings that the first
experimental imagist poems were read and
discussed, among these being Hulmes own
poems.

Imagism
Hulme wrote a great deal, but most of his writing was
in the form of brief notes, intended solely for his own
reference
Died in 1917, in the First World War
Herbert Read edited for publication the bulk of these
notes
1924, Speculations (London: Kegan Paul; New York:
Harcourt, Brace)
another collection of brief fragments - arranged by
the same editor, and published under the title "Notes
on Language and Style", first as an article in the
Criterion (Vol. III, No. XII, July 1925)

Imagism
main tendencies of Hulme's thought:
we have reached the end of a humanistic period (which
began, of course, with the Renaissance); humanism is a
disease, a weakness which carries within itself the seed of
its own destruction
inevitable result of humanism is romanticism, and the
exaltation of the individual
to the humanistic attitude he opposes the religious =
"way of thinking," which may find expression in myth, but
which at the same time is independent of myth; an
attitude based upon a belief in absolute values, in the
light of which "man himself is judged to be essentially
limited and imperfect "A man is essentially bad, he
can only accomplish anything of value by discipline -ethical and political. Order is thus not merely negative,
but creative and liberating" new classicism (as opposed
to romanticism).

Imagism
imagination vs. fancy
Hulme limits imagination to the realm of the
emotions, and fancy to the realm of finite
things
Fancy must be the "weapon" of the modern
poet; it enables the poet to create the physical
image = the very basis of poetic expression:
"Visual meanings can only be transferred by the
new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets
them leak out. . . . . Fancy is not mere decoration
added on to plain speech. Plain speech is
essentially inaccurate. It is only by new metaphors,
that is, by fancy, that it can be made precise."

Imagism
1909: Hulme made the acquaintance of
F. S. Flint, who had been writing a series
of articles in advocacy of vers libre a
new dining-and-talking society
(unnamed), which thereafter held
regular meetings on Thursday evenings
at a restaurant in Soho (the Latin
Quarter of London)
The Egoist, London May 1, 1915: F. S. Flint
brief article entitled The History of
Imagism:

Imagism
I think that what brought the real nucleus of this
group together was dissatisfaction with English
poetry as it was then (and is still, alas!) being
written. We proposed at various times to replace
it by pure vers libre; by the Japanese tanka and
haikai; we all wrote dozens of the latter as an
amusement; by poems in a sacred Hebrew
form ... by rhymeless poems like Hulmes
Autumn, and so on. In all this Hulme was
ringleader. He insisted too on absolutely accurate
presentation and no verbiage.... There was also a
lot of talk and practice among usof what we
called the Image. We were very much influenced
by modern French Symbolist poetry.

Imagism
April 22, 1909: Ezra Pound joined the group
the group died a lingering death at the end of its
second winter

its discussions had a sequel:

1912: E. Pound published at the end of his book,
Ripostes, the complete poetical works of T. E.
Hulme:
five poems, thirty-three lines
+ a preface:
"As for the future, Les Imagistes, the descendants
of the forgotten school of 1909 (previously referred
to as the School of Images) have that (Hulmes
poetry) in their keeping."

Imagism
same year: Pound had become interested in
modern French poetry
had broken away from his old manner
invented the term Imagisme to designate the
aesthetics of Les Imagistes.

Imagism as a Movement:

British magazines:
English Review, 1909, editor Ford Madox
Hueffer (editor Ford Madox Ford)
Poetry Review & Poetry and Drama (1912-1914;
editor Harold Monro)
The Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany (1919) &
The Egoist. An Individualist Review (1914
1919), editors R. Aldington, H.D., T.S. Eliot

Imagism
Anthologies:
Des Imagistes: An Anthology. New York: Albert
and Charles Boni; London: Poetry Bookshop,
1914
Editors not indicated
no preface to explain the technique or to
indicate the ideals of the poets.

Some Imagist Poets, Boston and New York:

Houghton Mifflin Company,
1915; 1916: preface, unsigned, written almost
entirely by Amy Lowell
1917, editor: Amy Lowell; preface written, but
unsigned, by Richard Aldington.

Imagism
= the official imagist
credo; Pound was no longer a member of the
group

Amy Lowells preface (1915)

six articles/poetic rules:

Use the language of common speech, employing always
the right word.
Create new rhythms (free verse is recommended) to
express the individuality of the poet.
Have absolute freedom in the choice of the subject of
the poem.
Present images, and not vague generalities.
Write hard and clear, not blurred and indefinite, poetry.
Use concentrated poetic expression.

Imagism
the official imagists were: Richard
Aldington (British), H. D. (American),
John Gould Fletcher (American), F. S.
Flint (British), D. H. Lawrence (British),
and Amy Lowell (American)
imagism as a movement ended with the
publication of the fourth anthology in
April 1917.

Imagism
American magazine: Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse,1912 , 1913, editor Harriet Monroe
Vol. I, nr. 6, March 1913:
the principles of imagism: printed over the
signature of F. S. Flint in what purported to be an
interview with an imagist but which as a matter of
fact was merely a statement by E. Pound
in the same number, appeared "A Few Don'ts by an
Imagiste, signed by Pound himself.
in the "interview" the four cardinal principles of
Imagism are set forth as:

Imagism
1. "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether
subjective or objective
2. "To use absolutely no word that does not
contribute to the presentation.
3. "As regards rhythm, to compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome."
4. To conform to the "doctrine of the image" -which the author says has not been defined for
publication, as it does not concern the public and
would provoke useless discussion.

Pounds definition of the image (same issue):

that which represents an intellectual and emotional

complex in an instant of time.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
What is the thing in this poem?
Explain the intellectual and emotional

complex in an instant of time in relation to

this poem.

Imagism
The origins of the name image and
derivatives (summary):
E. Pound did not start the discussion of "the image;
it was T. E. Hulme.
Pound was the first to employ the derivatives of this
term in print:
Pound introduced them:
to England in the preface to Hulme's poems
to America in the November 1912 issue of Poetry
(Chicago), wherein appeared three poems by
Richard Aldington, with a biographical note
classifying him as an "imagiste."

Imagism
January 1913 issue of Poetry, Pound
contributed some literary notes from
London:
"The youngest school here that has the nerve
to call itself a school is that of the Imagistes."
same issue: three poems signed "H. D.,
Imagiste."
Pound, acting as Poetry's London
representative, obtained the poems from
Aldington and H. D. and sent them to Chicago

Vorticism
1914 Pound started finding Imagism too limiting
turned to Vorticism:
established by Wyndham Lewis (British painter,
novelist, and journalist, 1882-1957) in 1914.
avant-garde movement in British art drawing on
futurism, cubism, and expressionism celebration of
German aesthetics and the principles of energy,
visual violence, and dynamism
represented by the journal Blast, edited by Lewis
For Pound: energy and emotion expressed in pure
form. The image was now defined as:
a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must
perforce, call a vortex, from which and through
which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.

The Cantos (1915 1970)

116 poems
Critical interpretation of the evolution
and involution of European culture
and history
Included elements of autobiography
coded in classical myth
How the substantial, harmonious
classical culture decayed / emptied
into chaotic mechanical modernity.

The Cantos (1915 1970)

Pound modeled the Cantos on:
Homer ( The Iliad, The Odyssey)
Dante (The Divine Comedy).
The composition was to be polyphonic (Gk.
poluphnia multiplicity of sounds) rather than
symphonic (Via Latin and Greek sumphnia
harmony, literally sounding together), developing
cyclically and spirally rather than in a straight
narrative line. (see Arnold Schoenbergs Pierrot
Lunaire and Marcel Duchamps Marcel Duchamp's
Nude Descending A Staircase analogies)

The Cantos (1915 1970)

epic ambition -> inclusion of:
History dramatized
The documentary combined with the romantic
The statistical info (Homer example) & heroworshipping (idem)

The heroic man lives in and produces a

just and/ or heroic epoch when man is in
tune with a natural universe full of vital
forces, intuited directly as factual
experiences, but expressed as myths.

The Cantos (1915 1970)

Like Whitmans Leaves of Grass (1855) the
Cantos grew with Pounds life and art
experience its provisional aspect:
suggested by titles of the Cantos series and their
contents:
the first words of Canto I: And then
the first volume of the Cantos was A Draft of ,
the last volume was Drafts and Fragments
the working title was Cantos of a Poem of some
Length.

Canto I (1925)
Pound used a Latin version of Homer's Odyssey by
Andreas Divus (dated 1538):

On the metre and syntax of a 1911 version of the AngloSaxon poem The Seafarer, Pound made an English version
of Divus' rendering of the Nekuia episode (11th book of the
Odyssey):

Odysseus and his companions sail to Hades in order to find

out their future.

Odysseus - an heroic explorer cultivating the gods and acting

significantly (great deeds) in search of knowledge

a metaphor of classicism as meaningful and balanced

an allegory of Pound at the beginning of his poetical journey, a
voyage of the artists self and a world history discovery to meet
love (Aphrodite) and temptation (Circe) as forgetfulness / erotic
sensuality

Canto I (1925)
apparent senseless structure of the poem is the result
in the belief in the authenticity of live art as life: a
multifarious flux, an open form
Journey to the underworld, seeking direction from the
dead
symbolic intention > it goes back to the original
ground of knowledge > a respectful enquiring
relation with nature and with the human past, gained
through submission (see his following the ritual
[poetry, art] indicated by Circe) > we ascend to the
source of Western literature and wisdom in order
to get our bearings [Tiresias, Divus, Dartona Cretensis
(the Cretan)].
The Cantos as epic of knowledge. Suggested in
lines 70-74: the Sirens, Circe, Aphrodite > sensory,
carnal, visionary knowledge.

Canto I (1925)
Odysseus = first-person speaker of the
Canto; Pound protagonist and author
Pound, the poet, engaged in this journey to
the past and back, to the present in order
to create original and substantial art
Odysseus sails on his appointed voyage
past the Sirens to Circes enchantment
(dangers of being swallowed by tradition),
leading to a worshipful encounter with
Aphrodite (aesthetic revival)

Canto I (1925)
first part of Canto I: on its symbolic level Pounds
answer to the raised question for the relationship
between the present and the past
It is the past that influences and maybe
determines the present and it is the past that shall
be asked for knowledge to lead us
Elphenor here = our debt to the past our
responsibility to cherish and take care of that
what is the past = our tradition rejection of
modernity
The past and the present are not mutually exclusive;
The past as the motoric force of the present; if the
present stands still it is because weve lost our
sensitivity to the past and forgot its value and
meaning.

Canto I (1925)
initiatory rites of Proserpina / Persephone:

daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was

abducted by Hades, king of the underworld; she
spent half the year in the underworld and half
the year on earth with her mother; her return to
earth symbolized the arrival of spring; the
branch [golden bough] was held up to her as an
offering
such an offering symbolized the golden bough
bearers understanding of her polarity (good and
evil): to enter the darkness was to return to the
light (a necessarily cyclic universe)
Necessary to regain cultural past: contribute
to the present.

William Carlos Williams (18831963)

William Carlos Williams, 1926

Graduated from the University

of Pennsylvania Medical School;
studied pediatrics at the
University of Leipzig in
Germany
By late 1912, Williams had
returned to Rutherford & set up
a private practice
prolific writer, and for much of
his life he published a book at
least every two years
friend with the avant-garde
modern artists Francis Picabia
and Marcel Duchamp
found modern art very
inspiring; involved in the 1913
"Armory Show"

William Carlos Williams (18831963)

1950: public recognition of his writing
the National Book Award in poetry for
the third volume of Paterson.
1953: won the Bollingen Prize (awarded
by Yale University for achievement in
American poetry, see E. Pound)
in 1963 (after his death): won a Pulitzer
Prize for poetry for Pictures from
Brueghel.

Poetic Principles
use of simple, direct language
avoided complexity and obscure
symbolism: All this/ was for you, old
woman./ I wanted to write a poem/ that
you would understand. (January
Morning, 1938)
Four poetic qualities:

1. the use of commonplace subjects and

themes; the poet must write about things
people can respond to, things people have seen
and know literature should not stand
separate from its readers

Poetic Principles
2. the poets duty to write about real events or
objects in a language that all people could
understand, with an ear for the way people
actually speak
called his language "the American idiom"
stressed repeatedly that it was different from formal
English it allowed for speech patterns that could
violate grammatical rules
Experimented with short poems that were fragments
of speech on individual moments, thoughts, feelings,
or images ["This Is Just To Say" (1934): I have
eaten/ the plums/ that were/ in the icebox...]

Poetic Principles
3. specificity:
objected to traditional poetry that talked in
generalities / aboutness (Williamss term)
e.g.: poems that treated love, death, anger,
and friendship as abstractions rather than as
real things/everydayness
coined the phrase "No ideas but in things"
trend called OBJECTIVISM, in response to
E. Pounds Imagism:

Poetic Principles
a prose passage from the volume Spring and All
(1923):
in great works of the imagination a creative
force is shown at work making objects which
alone complete science and allow
intelligence to survive
works of artmust be real, not realism but
reality itself.

4. the poets responsibility to write about

his or her locale; poetry should be local
Williams assumed and actively
engaged with modernity, did not reject
it.

Poetic Principles
only by knowing a small fragment of life thoroughly could
anyone hope to understand the total picture of human
existence:
e.g. Paterson: the town of Paterson, New Jersey
industrialized New Jersey; nature, represented in the
poem by the Passaic River and its well-known falls, met
with industry in the town of Paterson, where the falls
provided waterpower to the area
each object, each sensation, and each word has equal
validity and equal reality, and each contains a storehouse
of energy
no abstractions or overt symbols
no conventional poetic forms; the subject dictates the form
continually experimented with free verse.
scarce literary / cultural allusions or quotations
(e.g.Paterson)

William C. Williams & High Modernism

Pound:

highbrow aestheticist European modernism>

Eurocentrism>
focus on art as superior realm of truth >
nostalgia for classical culture (Latin and Greek)
in opposition to modernity perceived as
capitalism (The Cantos).

Williams:

low brow, locally engaged modernism >

interest in the local American language & culture
(urban as little town America, his 1880s
Rutherford, New Jersey: Paterson & In the
American Grain)

William C. Williams & High Modernism

responds to Imagism maintaining a long transatlantic
correspondence with Pound:

resisted Pounds urgings to go to Europe;

clung to his native industrial New Jersey

References to canonical writers:

Eliot: a means to affirm standard hierarchies
Williams: dehierarchization and relativism as he was
a:
post-romantic, an American, and a modern (Elizabeth
Gregory, Quotation and Modern American Poetry:
Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, 1996)

William C. Williams & High Modernism

post-romantic: the romantic principle of
originality includes an implicit hierarchy,
by which those things not considered
original are rated secondary
Williams: a relativist reworking of the
romantic model, by denying the relevance of
the hierarchies in which they might be
ranked secondary
modern and American:
both involve similar and implicit
contradictions and hierarchies:

William C. Williams & High Modernism

Modern: suggests a welcome of the
present and of the new=not just a
break with outdated ways but a
break with sustaining traditions as
well
American: the descendants of
American immigrants have
experienced double allegiances, to
the Old World and to the New.

William C. Williams & High Modernism

T. S. Eliot responds to his haunting sense

of cultural secondariness by reaffirming

hierarchy + denying his low position within
it >

obscured his work's New World origins

(particularly emphatically in the notes to The
Waste Land)
Renounced his American citizenship
William Carlos Williams:
attempted to exorcise his sense of cultural
secondariness by denying the relevance of the
hierarchies through which such rankings are made

William C. Williams & High Modernism

extends the critique of hierarchy to challenge the notion of
hierarchy per se:
asserting instead a democratic value that obviates rank +
working with a relativist scheme that reinterprets the
secondary into value.
this kind of valuation does not rename the secondary as
primary, since that would defeat the point: America cannot
replace Europe; the European and the American are mutually
informative, not so distinct as old/new parallels suggest.

while Williams does feature the American most

prominently in his work, European influences past and
current are honored as well (e.g. borrowings from the
surrealists).

William C. Williams & High Modernism

Williams's work, like that of Eliot, exhibits the
double allegiance of the American modernist
poet toward:
the European literary past (and the hierarchies it
represents)
the American literary present.

In Williamss case both sides flourish

Paterson: the poem's take on standard hierarchies

fluctuates apparent in its treatment of gender
and of filiation:
both literal and metaphoric
a specific preoccupation with gender structures +
wider interest in the reworking of all hierarchies.

William C. Williams & High Modernism

E.g.: the acknowledgement of the feminine: in the
letters from Cress, in Mme Curie, and in the quotation
of Sappho

Paterson is Williams's response to T. S. Eliots

and E. Pounds poetry, and to the statement he
understood their poets to have made in
emigrating (place of residence and poetry being
intimately connected in Williams's view):
T. S. Eliot and E. Pound: retreat into the comforts of
nostalgia
Instead of trying to develop a new system of valuation
to replace the hierarchic structure that rated American
modernists secondary, Eliot and Pound attempted to
deny their Americanness and to claim a secure position
within the standard hierarchy.

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
Barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

Example of objective
imagism:
effort to devise a
verbal
representation of a
thing in nature

Highlighted the
sensuous values of
the rain-glazed
barrow and the
chickens NOT JUST
A SCENE FROM
NATURE.

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

metrical composition of rigorously selected
images in a symmetrical pattern:
sixteen words measured into four two line
stanzas of three and one words each

so much depends: in Emersons terms he

reflects that human civilization depends on
the interrelated forces of the machine (the
wheelbarrow lever), the natural force of
fertility (rain), and animal life (the chicken:
source of food and symbol of fertility).

The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)

Sensuous and aesthetic life is given to the
traditional wooden barrow transformed by
the red paint and the rain water glazing its
surface the poetic image as a

unique reality
Renewal of language by placing words and
images in fresh contexts that would cleanse
them of conventional symbolic associations to
reveal new meanings and relationships.

Paterson (1946-1958)
Theme stated in the Preface:
Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find
beauty when it is locked in the mind past all
remonstrance?
The five books of the poem: various ways by which
man tries to unlock his mind to find beauty:
Book I: The Delineaments of the Giants how the
schemes and plots of the past have become dead history.
Book II: Sunday in the Park how the present tires to
find beauty in mere self-indulgence.
Book III: The Library how the present seeks escape
in history and philosophy.
Book IV: The Run to the Sea how the present finds
beauty in its posterity.
Book V: untitled and dedicated to Toulouse-Lautrec
only beauty that persists is art.

Paterson (1946-1958)
The poem proceeds from the trials that end in failure
in the first three books to the trials that succeed in
the last two.
The first three books show the vitality of particular
people and make the point that personal striving for
only oneself ends in despair and failure
The last two books show that the best personal
vitality leads away from the person to the
perpetuation of life and to art
Not only does the entire poem flow from negative to
positive, so do the rhythms of each book:
Each book has three sections, the first showing the
striving, the second the failure, the third the
continuation of life in resignation.

Paterson (1946-1958)
dominant symbol throughout the book:
Paterson, the single man who is all men, as a city
contains many people yet has unity in being a place and
in having a name (only one man like a city).
Other symbols:
the river , the stream of life
the falls on the river, the concentration of energies
the sea, the end of the river, death, dissolution into
nature
the dogs are people in general
the library is the past, beautiful but of no real help to the
present
the unicorn, both male and female, is the persistence of
life
the unicorn tapestries in The Cloisters in New York City
are the permanence of art.

Paterson (1946-1958)
Introduction: The Program
The poets attempt to come to terms with the
experience of his own time (Paterson: Book I,
1946; Book II, 1948; Book III, 1949; Book IV,
1951; Book V, 1958) and place (the industrial city
of Paterson, New Jersey) [Sankey 2].
Paterson is a long poem in four parts that a man
in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving,
and concluding life in ways which the various aspects
of a city may embody if imaginatively conceived
any city, all the details of which may be made to
voice his most intimate convictions. (a note
prefacing Book I in 1946)
A Companion to William Carlos Williamss Paterson.
Benjamin Sankey. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971

Paterson (1946-1958)

I first began thinking of writing a long poem upon the

resemblance between the mind of modern man and a
cityThe thing was to use the multiple facets which a city
presented as representative for comparable facets of
contemporary thought, thus to be able to objectify the
man himself as we know him and love him and hate him
From the beginning I decided there would be four books
following the course of the river [the Passaic river] whose
life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as I
more and more thought of it: the river above the Falls, the
catastrophe of the Falls itself, the river below the Falls, and
the entrance at the end into the great sea. (Paterson, A
Statement by William Carlos Williams about the Book
Paterson, May 31, 1951, p. XIII, qtd. in John C. Thirlwall.
William Carlos Williams Paterson: The Search for the
Redeeming Language A Personal Epic in Five Parts, New
Directions 17 [1961], 252 310, re-qtd. in Sankey 1-2)

Paterson (1946-1958)
The Poets Job (pp. 2-8)

Paterson, the city (as a synecdoche of United States

urban civilization at the time), has been shaped and
damaged by forces outside the poets control. He has
trouble relating himself to it. However he feels that
only through the mediation of his own place can the
elemental forces of the earth enter his work.
Paterson, the poem, represents the poets struggle
with himself to accept his contemporary America.
In order to understand and accept it he has to
discover an appropriate language.
The entire poem concerns what Williams announced
as the subject of Book Three: the search for a
language by means of which to make vocal the
elemental features of Paterson and the modern
replicas. (Sankey 3)

Paterson (1946-1958)

This language had to be one appropriate to American people

living at the time of his writing in that place. He tried to
continue Whitmans search for an American language. (3)
Williamss America.

He deals with American history in a number of prose works of the

twenties and thirties. The best known and most influential: In the
American Grain (1925).
These works criticized the role of the Anglo-Saxon in the New World.
In the American Grain stressed the destruction of the native cultures
and the failure of transplanted European culture to replace them. The
present-day American: an Indian robbed of his world(4). The
colonization of the New World meant the imposition of the settlers
will on the new land. A successful strategy that bequeathed an
unrelated culture: a culture derivative from Europe and not
properly responsive to the newg. The Indian societies had possessed
cultures that were related to the local landscape. The white man
with his technological superiority had destroyed these cultures
without replacing them.

Paterson (1946-1958)

In Paterson the poets world has three aspects:

the elemental promise/primitive destiny of the place

its history since the coming of the white man, and
the present scene.

The present scene, molded by historical forces (e.g. by

Alexander Hamiltons plans for utilizing the power of the
Falls), is characterized by what Williams calls a stasis a
static order protecting the interests of a few while damaging
the environment and scanting the lives of the rest. The
prevailing stasis explains the actual ugliness confronting
the poet. (5)
What confronts the poet is a fallen world that has been
betrayed. Williams suggests that Hamilton was a kind of
Judas.
The poet, at great cost for himself, attempts to redeem it
by means of language.

Paterson (1946-1958)

There seem to be two ways in which the poet can be thought

of saving or rescuing his people:
By giving a permanent record of their lives (as Homer did
for the heroes of the Iliad)
By providing a living myth to unify and sustain them.
Together these two aims define the scope of the poets work:
The poem to meis an attempta failing experiment, toward
assertion with broken means, but an assertionof a new and
total culture, the lifting of an experiment to expression.
Thusthe poem is a social instrument accepted or not
accepted seems to be of no material importance. It embraces
everything we are. (Sankey 5, note 4: Letter to Henry Wells,
April 12, 1950, Selected Letters, p. 286)

Paterson (1946-1958)
But the language available to the poet is an Old World
language, English, a language that had developed in
response to quite other conditions and experiences:
They saw birds with rusty breasts and called them
robins. Thus, from the start, an America of which they
could have had no inkling drove the first settlers upon
their past. They retreated for warmth and reassurance
to something previously familiar. But at a cost. For
what they saw were not robins (The American
Background, Selected Essays, p. 134)
The poet is called upon to invent:, to devise a new
poetic language, appropriate to the New World and
the lives actually lived there. He cannot hope to
produce a finished. His job at this stage is to quarry
and prepare the language for the poets to come. (6)

Paterson (1946-1958)

Williams first turns to the Past hoping to find there a

quiet alternative to the Present noise and confusion
(Book III). He finds out that the past was no quieter.
Then: the poet catches a glimpse of a permanent source
concealed within the violence and multiplicity of the present
scene: the elemental, manifesting itself through the local.
Does the poet succeed? The conclusion of Paterson is
ambiguous, presumably deliberately so. Book Four ends
with a passage combining the notions of death and birth.
Book Four:

Death: A murderer is hanged/other references to death.

Birth/Resurrection: Paterson, pictured as Odysseus swims to
shore a heads inland accompanied by his dog.
There is both a termination (i.e. death/the completion of the
poem/failure) and the promise of a beginning (the afterlife of a
work of art)

Paterson (1946-1958)
Book Five: is an afterthought: the
work of art does enjoy some kind of
survival after the death of the man
who made it. This is the hole in the
bag through which death is eluded.

The City of Paterson

Williams: the poet could best work through his own

locality. He was impressed by John Deweys: the locality
is the only universal (The Dial, LXVIII, June 1920, 687688).
in proportion as a man has bestirred himself to become
awake to his own locality he will perceive more and more of
what it disclosed and find himself in a position to make the
necessary translations (eu: ?). The disclosure willcome to
him as reality, as joy, as release. For these men
communicate with each other and strive to invent new
devices. But he who does not know his own worldmust
either stupidly fail to learn from foreign work or stupidly
swallow it without knowing how to judge of its essential
value. (p. 8, qtd. from Comment [1921] in Selected
Essays, p. 28)

The City of Paterson

He had visited Europe. He had been
impressed. Had chosen to return when
many American writers were choosing
Europe.
The return as moral choice (see the
conclusion of A Voyage to Pagany and in
the dialogue with Valery Larbaud
reported in In the American Grain meant
choosing to work against odds (instead
of becoming cosmopolitan like Pound)
by using the local as a source.

The City of Paterson

The plan for Paterson celebrated the local:
The first idea centering upon the poem...: to
find an image large enough to embody the
whole knowable world about me. The longer I
lived in my placed, among the details of my life,
I realized that these isolated observations and
experiences needed pulling together to gain
profundity. I already had the riverI wanted to
write about the people close about me: to know
in minute detail what I was talking about to
the whites of their eyes, to their very smells.
(p. 9, from Autobiography p. 391)

The City of Paterson

Paterson makes extensive use of accurate local
geography and history. George Zabriskie (spent
the first 20 years of his life in Paterson): in its
geography and history Paterson is as literal as a
Baedeker (The Geography of Paterson,
Perspective, VI [Autumn 1953], 201-216).
The citys topography supports the poems basic
symbolism: a sleeping male giant resting against
a female giant (the mountain). The course of the
Passaic River, originating in the mountains,
forming the Falls, then moving out to the sea,
gives Williams a local embodiment for the river
of life concept.

The City of Paterson

The citys history provides a synecdoche for the history of

the United States as Williams saw it: colonization, struggles
with the Indians, the exploitation of natural resources,
industrialism, and the gradual degradation of the
environment.
The growth of Paterson tests the program that Williams
associates with Alexander Hamilton: to make the new
country a commercial and manufacturing nation along
European lines by encouraging local industry, repaying the
debts incurred during the Revolution, and harnessing the
countrys natural resources. For Williams the plan ignored
the local genius.
In trying to reproduce European civilization in America it
thwarted the promise latent here. Paterson grew into a
company town known for its labor troubles; the Passaic
River became a swillhole.

Method and Principal Symbols

The method is allegorical. However: no
unambiguous system of allegorical
meanings for the literal terms.
Symbolic terms merge and overlap.
However, there is a logic governing them.
No straightforward narrative base.
It is a modernist, experimental poem like
The Cantos or The Bridge.
Like other experimental poets he owed a
good bit to the prose writers, notably
Joyce.

Method and Principal Symbols

It is an inclusive poem containing narrative, lyrical,
dramatic elements, editorial-like passages of
reflection, news, documentation.
The modern practices are governed by Romantic
procedures: e.g. the allegorical/symbolic narrative as
managed by Keats/Blake/Wordsworth and the
selective autobiography of a poets mind, as carried
out by Wordsworth in The Prelude. Williamss early
poem The Wanderer: A Rococo Study, Collected
Earlier Poems, pp. 1-12, was apparently based on an
earlier work Williams remembered as an imitation of
Keats. In a review Richard Ellman called attention to
the similarity between Williamss characters and some
of Blakes (Yale Review, XXXIX [Spring 1950], 544).

Method and Principal Symbols

The characters of Paterson form a
miscellaneous group, ranging from
historical figures and people Williams
knew to large allegorical personifications:
The key notion is Williamss conception of a man
like a city and a woman (or many women) like
a/ flower/flowers.
Paterson is the elemental city the basic city
on which the present city is built, and the hidden
promise that the present industrial city thaw.rts.
His wife is the mountain nearby, whose head
forms Garret Mountain Park.

Method and Principal Symbols

The male figure of the poem is a man as well as a city.

He is also a mythic giant whose dreams (like those of
Joyces Finnegan, or those of Havelock the Dane in the
patriotic fairy tale) animate the people who inhabit the
place.
The idea of a sleeping giant animating the people of the
area, expresses Williamss notion that a poet must give
life to his people if they are truly to live. It also describes
the relationship between individuals and the
permanent elemental forces active, though
unrecognized, in their lives.
These forces are the powers of earth, acting through the
place, and through the persistent psychological energies of
sexual love and religious awe. Book Two presents poor
modern replicas of them.

Method and Principal Symbols

The city of Paterson appears as both a
particular person
Dr. P., a persona for the poet and as a
mythic concept, the sleeping force and
genius of Paterson, the spirit and elemental
promise of the place, distinct from its
modern embodiments, yet nourishing and
guiding them.
As an individual: Paterson visits patients,
receives letters, takes a walk in the Park,
and tries to write the poem; as city and
giant: his thoughts are listed in the
telephone directory.

Method and Principal Symbols

The female of the poem, pictured as a mountain (the Parks

her head), as a flower, and as various specific women, stands
for the poets world.
She is his counterpart, his subject matter and the source of his
inspiration. As the poet is the formative principle she is what he
forms.
In one set of meanings, the woman is the American wilderness,
mauled and raped by invaders from Europe, as well as the
ravished Park, invaded and abused on Sundays by picnickers
from the city.
In other terms, she is contemporary reality offering herself as
wife to the reluctant poet. She is Patersons first wife, and
appears as the oldest wife of the African chief in the
Geographic photograph.
She is also Beautiful thing, a symbolic notion which Williams
embodies as a fire attacking the city, and as one or more young
Negro women. Phyllis, the tough young girl from the back
country in Book Four, manifests the elemental feminine
principle of the poem, serving as a female Paterson.

Method and Principal Symbols

Marriage is the condition of the primal
landscape, and it is still the mythic
norm.
But in fact our own time is characterized
by divorce, as we wait for the poet
who can bring things together (marry
them) by means of language.
As the one who marries, the poet is
both a minister performing rites and a
bee transferring polen from one flower
to another; he is also, the husband.

Method and Principal Symbols

Other metaphorical figures drawn from the local geography: the

Passaic River and its Falls, the waterpower of which had called
the city of Paterson into existence. The river suggests the course
of life.
The roar made by the Falls as it hit the rocks below is used by
Williams to represent the challenge faced by the poet to articulate
the meaning of life, and specifically the life of this place now.
The roar is the confusion and noise to be unraveled its multiple
strands sorted out, ordered, supplied with a meaning. It stands for
uninterpreted experience of the poet and the people of the area
(and of the United States).
The multiple waters of the Falls stand for the poets/giants
thoughts/the people/the multiple racial and linguistic strands in
the United States. The roar suggests the gabble of languages and
cultures which must be given significance and unity by a poet.
Challenged by the roar, Paterson listens intently to the voice that
will provide his answer to it: the new language, expressive of the
place and its people.

Method and Principal Symbols

Associated with the Falls are several figures from local history:
Sara Cumming (who fell to her death from above the Falls);
the famous daredevil Sam Patch, and a tightrope walker named
Harry Leslie. Patch and Leslie are figures for the poet suggesting
the risk and showmanship of the poets work.
To write a poem is to take a chance, as Sam Patch did when he
leapt from the Falls, and even fail, as Sam did in his final leap from
the Falls of the Geneese River. The poet, like the leaper or
tightrope walker, can be thought of as risking failure and in a
sense death in full view of the public. If he fails, the reason may
be lack of skill: language failed Patch in his last jump. Mrs. Cthe
reason may be lack of skill: language failed Patch in his last
jump.
Mrs. Cumming, whose death came while visiting the Fumming,
whose death came while visiting the Falls with halls with her
husband, a minister, supplies a punning symbol for that kind of
death which comes to those who lack a language plunging into
the water without minister.

Method and Principal Symbols

Modernism: ART existential meaning for the
modernist artist.
Dogs are mentioned as counterparts for people.

The collie bitch in Book Two is a manifestation of the

female principle of the poem a Venus, newly washed. The
strands of her coat, resembling the waters of the Falls,
stroked into order by her master. Musty, the dog who,
while in heat, escapes the careful surveillance of the friend
entrusted by her owner, provides a comic symbol for the
natural passions, unruly and generative.
She is also an instance of the unmastered feminine
principle: subject matter without a poet. At the end of Book
Four, when Paterson emerges from the sea, he is
accompanied by his faithful dog (a Chesapeake Bay
retriever, as Williams later noted) a birth of Venus, in
which the poet represents beauty, or the poem itself.

The Shape of the Poem

Paterson is in part a logical structure laid out in advance,

in part an improvisation. The books of the poem have titles.
The arrangement of events is topical, to an extent. Within
each book the movement has a kind of chronology. The four
books correspond roughly to stages in mans life, seasons of
the year, and so on.
Such schematism gives the poem a clarity of structure, an
overall order and direction, but the argument often seems to
move along abruptly and without a plan. This is also part of
a plan. Williams means the poem to appear both as a
completed design and as a recorded struggle to write the
poem. He also favored a certain obscurity, analogous to
what he saw in some modern paintings, as the source of a
necessary impact on the person looking at a painting or
reading the poem:

The Shape of the Poem

It is like some kind of modern painting. The painter tries to

produce a particular emotion in the beholder. To do so he
does not necessarily have to paint a photographic
representation of this subject. The result is something that
isnt popular and it isnt always successful; but thats the
way Ive always tried to work.
Obscurity, once it is penetrated, is found to be a relatively
simple matter. Its a very necessary impact to the listener
and reader when anything new is presented. Once a man
has penetrated the obscure jungle, he is likely to come on a
plateau where he has a much broader vision than he ever
knew in the past. (Sankey 15 from newspaper interview in
1950, qtd. by John C. Thirlwall. William Carlos Williams
Paterson: The Search for the Redeeming Language A
Personal Epic in Five Parts, New Directions 17 [1961], 252310 p. 289)

The Shape of the Poem

Juxtaposition, as a narrative/poetic
device used by Williams, was not new:

Glauco Cambon (The Inclusive Flame:

Studies in American Poetry. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1963) describes
the method of Paterson as a montage
technique whose direct antecedents are to
be found in Pounds Cantos and in Dos
Passoss U.S.A. trilogy. (Sankey 15 from
Cambon 191).
Also used by Joyce and others to represent
stream of consciousness, as when Paterson
sits in the Library trying to read.

The Shape of the Poem

Williams establishes connections or
analogies.
Paterson poet/genius of the place is actively
searching for meaning within the apparent
chaos of modern experience.
The chaos Williams exhibits at the surface of
the poem is a mask: the reader is given the
same job with Paterson: to locate the
principles latent in things/facts.

The Shape of the Poem

In Kora in Hell, 1920 Williams had argued
that the imagination discovers in things
those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to
all other things which are the peculiar
perfections of the things in question, that
the loose linking of one thing to another
has effects of destructive power, but that by
virtue of the imaginations harmonizing
power, on this level of the imagination all
things and ages meet in fellowship. (Sankey
16 from Prologue to Kora in Hell, in Selected
Essays, 16; Imaginations, pp. 18-19)

The Shape of the Poem

Imagination destroys old groupings, creates new
ones. This principle operates in Paterson. The
skipping around from one thing to another is an
imitation of what the mind does as it acts: not just
accidents of association, but active perception.
Imagination notices a connection/resemblance and
quickly its move, more rapidly and convincingly than
one can explain it.
Consequently: the collocations of Paterson have two
aspects:
the deliberately achieved impact by a violation of the
readers expectations, the surprise of finding these
things brought together
and a logic clear to Williams, increasingly clear to the
reader a largely thematic logic.

The Use of Prose

The most striking feature of Williamss innovations
was the extensive use of prose, not in notes at the
end of the poem (as in The Waste Land) nor blocked
out as part of the verse (as in The Cantos), but
conspicuously inserted into the text and conspicuously
unpoetic in shape.
Possible influences:

Pound (his procedure appreciated as a special movement of

the intelligence beyond usual thought and action.
(Sankey 16 from Excerpts from a Cxcerpts from a Critical
Sketch, Selected Essays 108);
Aucassin et Nicolette, a medieval French chantefable, or
combination of prose and verse (literally, a "sung story"),
similar to a prosimetrum (a literary piece that is made up
of alternating passages of prose and poetry).

The Use of Prose

Williamss use of prose in Paterson had
metrical significance for him.
One main subject of the poem is the search
for language. Williams tries to exhibit the
language that already exists (dialogues,
letters, that already exists (dialogues,
letters, newspapers, local lingo) and its
rhythms and phrasing hinting at the
essential idiom he is searching.
E.g. the workaday prose of Mrs. Cummings
death old account.

The Use of Prose

Another reason for the prose:

the counterpoint, Williamss practice of juxtaposing

ostensibly unrelated items.
Ralph Nash enumerates variations of counterpoints in
Paterson. Affecting pace and tempo: the intrusion of flat
prose rhythms; the occasional rhythmic and vivid prose.
The ironic juxtaposition of lyric affirmations and
unpleasant facts; grim urban scenes opposed to pastoral
village life. Dirt vs. pure; resolution vs. confusion; dream
vs. fact; poet vs. city. (. pure; resolution vs. confusion;
dream vs. fact; poet vs. city. (Ralph Nash, The Use of
Prose in Paterson, Perspective, VI (Autumn 1953),191199.

The mixture of prose and poetry extend the power of

imagination over the old limiting perceptions of what
poetry is/should be (e.g. yesterdays weather not
usually included in a poem).

The Style
Descriptive of details.
Explosions of semi-philosophical commentary:
often a formal move to help organize the details.
The descriptions contain symbolic argument in
the form of synecdoche or analogy.

E.g. when he describes the Park and the people in it,

he also describes the American people and the
American continent. Sunday in the Park implies an
elaborate myth about the American past.
When he describes the leaps and recoveries of the
waters of the Falls, he is also describing the course of
a mans the is also describing the course of a mans
thoughts.

The Style
As the reader learns to recognize the poems
recurrent metaphors (e.g. wind for spirit and
inspiration) he will also recognize allusions to
these key terms in ostensibly descriptive
passages.
The motto No ideas but in things means that
the ideas will be grounded on things present in
actual experience and actually described in the
poem.
In Paterson a description can be entirely
realistic (i.e. an exact presentation of
something the poet has seen), and its
implications nevertheless managed
nonrealistically by means of pun or allegory.

The Style
Because Williams varies his procedures for
deriving meaning from detail, Paterson is
an unusually tricky poem.
Generally the language is clear and natural.
It can be intricate and discontinuous
where special exigencies of transition
or metaphor tempt Williams to skip over
steps in the presentation of an idea, or to
move without explanation to a new subject.
a certain calculated obscurity

The Style
Williams does not want the reader to grasp the
meaning of particular passages until he has grasped
the overall argument.
Where the language is obscure: Williams breaks off a
sentence or introduces an ambiguous pronoun
reference.
Often a change in line form or a shift to prose will
signal a change of the foreground subject, though the
general line of argument continues.
Other obscurities are caused by Williamss handling of
metaphor. The meaning of a metaphorical term may
be influenced by (or depend on) an oblique relation to
one of the poems main symbols.
Sometimes he mixes the metaphors drastically.

The Style
Versification of Paterson is reasonably varied and
uneven.
The verse of Paterson dates from various stages of
Williamss career.
The verse if free. There is almost no rhyme.
Williams in Paterson experiments with the
mixture/alteration of highly sophisticated literary
procedures and the spontaneous.

Certain features of the poem originate in a self-conscious

literary tradition going back to Joyce and early Pound (and,
through these writers, to the pre-Raphaelites, Gautier or
Flaubert.
Other features are rooted in Williamss temperament:
impatience, distrust of logic, quickness to invent procedures,
to take chances.
The effect of this hybrid procedure: to keep the reader
fascinated and d a bit dazed.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
Preface:

Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you

find beauty when it is located in the mind past
all remonstrance?
The central theme of Paterson: the poets
attempt to find a language by which to express
the beauty that is locked in the mind.
The next passage provides the beginning of an
answer: the poet will make a start/out of
particulars, intending to make them general,
rolling/up the sum But the means are
defective: there is no ready-made language for
the poem.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
Williams pictures the poet as a dog, sniffing the
trees, no hero, just an ordinary fellow. The dog
sniffing trees, marking them with his urine marks
off a territory, defines a subject: just another
dog / among a lot of dogs.
The poet is a lame dog; the sound ones have run
out on more normal quests (after the rabbits,
i.e. material success or the safe traditions and
prestige offered by Europe to poets like Eliot and
Pound.
The poet of Paterson may not be the best of the
bunch, but he is the only one who has not run
off. He has the territory for what it is worth.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
The knowledge the poet obtains is just selfknowledge:

For the beginning is assuredly/the end since we

know nothing, pure/and simple, beyond/our own
complexities.

This semilogical transition leads Williams into

what Martz (Louis L. Martz. The Poem of the
Mind. New York, 1966, 143) considers a wry
echo of Eliots East Coker. Martz suggest that
Paterson may be a deliberate counterpart of
Four Quartets, the eternal Pelagians answer to
the doctrine of original sin. (Sankey 28; Martz
143)

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
there is/no return Though the end can only be selfknowledge, we cannot return to the same self from
which the quest proceeded. In returning we find
ourselves changed by the knowledge acquired in the
interval.
This introduces the poems central analogy:

man and city constitute an identityanalogy: man and city

constitute an identityinterpenetration, both ways. Man
participates in the character of his city, and the reverse.
This is explained by a quotation from Santayana (The Last
Puritan used by Williams at the outset of Book Three) in
which cities are said to be a second body for the human
mind, a second organism, more rational, permanent and
decorative than the animal organism of flesh and blood

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
Major difference between the American
High Modernists (e.g. Ezra Pound, T.S.
Eliot) and the American Low Modernists:
The first ones believe in European classical
culture (Greek and Latin) as the redeemer of
modernist art. The last ones believe in the
local (American) re-expressed as the source of
authentic renewal (e.g. Williams, Stevens)

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
The interpenetration of man and city
illustrates the act of synthesis
(Rolling/up!) as uniting different/opposite
things.

E.g. ignorance and knowledge overlap and

reinforce each other. The paradoxical identity
here is just a warning against confidence in fixed
categories: In ignorance/a certain knowledge
and knowledge,/undispersed, its own undoing.
Ignorance contains a certain knowledge a
freshness of perception that may be lost with
experience; knowledge may lead to its opposite
by failing to disperse itself, by rigidity and a
failure of expression.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
Undispersed knowledge goes stale: the image of a
seed packed tight with detail gone sour and lost in
the flux, while the mind, distracted floats off in the
same / scum. The seed is the potency of knowledge,
rendered impotent by the failure of distribution (by
faulty sowing).
The subject: the poets attempt at a synthesis
(Rolling up, rolling up heavy with/numbers) and his
attempt to avoid simply repeating what has already
been done. He has the advantage of ignorance. The
image of the ignorant sun/rising in the slot of/hollow
suns risen... suggests the freshness of coming onto
the scene for the first time, in unawareness that one
is participating in a cycle.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants

The first section of Book One opens with a sketch of the

landscape around Paterson. Williams introduces some of the
meanings he associates with three main geographical
personifications: the city, the river, and the low Mountain
nearby. (31)
Patersons dreams (some personification of the city is
indicated) enter the desires of the people. These
thoughts/dreams are powered by the river: drawing their
substance from the noise of the pouring/river, which
indirectly animate a thousand automatons. The Paterson
people are automatons because their lives derive from
that of the anthropomorphous city and, also, because they
are unaroused, i.e. unaware of the very energy source of
their lives and their limits/disappointments. Patersons sleep
is associated with the peoples unawareness. The role of the
poet: to articulate the citys reveries rousing the people by
defective means.

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants

The central theme of the poem will be the poets attempts to give
voice to the life of this place. (31) The ideas poetically
supporting the poem are meant to revive the place (including all
its elements/things: trees, buildings, etc.): Say it, no ideas but in
things, states the literary means used for the revival
Williams explains: The poet does notpermit himself to go
beyond the thought to be discovered in the context of that with
which he is dealing: no ideas but in things. (32)

--Say it, no ideas but in things

nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained
secretinto the body of the light! (Paterson, New York: New Directions,
1995, 6-7)

BOOK ONE (1946) The

Delineaments of the Giants
The trees have acquired their various shapes as
preconception (innate character) and
accident. Each tree has come into a public
existence particularized bent, forked, split, etc.
The poet starts from a world of
things/people/places already shaped/damaged.
But each of them contains/hides the poetry to be
detected and brought to light by the poet
(secretinto the body of the light!).
The blank faces are expressionless,
uninterpreted, secret until the poets interprets
them, bringing them by means of language into
the body of the light!

Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)

born in Reading, Pennsylvania

spent most of his adult life
working for an insurance
company in Connecticut
first book of poetry,
Harmonium, was published in
1923
two more major books of
poetry during the 1920s and
1930s
three more in the 1940s
received the National Book
Award in 1951 and 1955
won the Pulitzer Prize in
1955.

Poetic Principles
Everydayness transformed by art into
miracles / the miraculous
In an age that had rejected religious belief
poetry had to satisfy mans need for spiritual
sustenance:

Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of

empty heaven and its hymns (The Man With the
Blue Guitar)

The acts of poetic perception and creation =

analogous to the religious experience
searched for ways to celebrate the world
releasing him from the malady of the quotidian.

Poetic Principles
the poem: an unparaphrasable reality,
existing wholly within its language and
elevating poet and reader to a state of
transcendence.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942):
the criteria for the formation of the ultimate
poem / the supreme fiction that enables man to
accept himself and his world on their own terms:

the supreme fiction: a poem which all men

could behold, stripped of its antecedents (a
new epiphany, nor God revealed, but man
centered, and revealing man).

Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)

His aesthetics:

reality is a combination of the physical world

and imagination
the action of mans imagination upon his
surroundings constitutes his sense of the world
and, finally the world itself.
the poet is continuously engaged in the
process of imposing order on his world by
putting his perceptions into words; he
has a rage for order:
Lets see the very thing and nothing else /
Lets see it with the hottest fire of sight.
(Credences of Summer)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)

In an imperfect & changing world the order that the
poet establishes through the poem is only a
momentary, unstable order, with disintegration
inherent to it.
The poet, who is himself changing, can see an object
one moment in one way and a moment later see it in
another way (Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird)
the poem: not a revelation of truth, but one
truth among many, revealed through the interaction
of the seeing eye of the imagination and the images
he perceives: We live in a constellation / Of patches
and of pitches, / Not in a single world. (July
Mountain)

Wallace Stevens (1879-1975)

The poet as mythmaker:
unites himself and the world, celebrates
himself as indispensable part of the
process
his fluent mundo is a world only fully
realized when it is imaginatively
heightened by words
THE POET: creative center of vision,
transforming the ordinary world by his
touch.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
Stevens emphasized that this gathering of poems
was intended as a collection of sensations
(Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972, 251, 1928).
Each section invites the reader to realize one
strong visual effect, as if perceiving/making a
drawing centered on one/more blackbirds.
Relations between black and white, motion and
stillness, and other opposites or contraries vary
throughout. (A Readers Guide to Wallace
Stevens. Eleanor Cook. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007, 75)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
This is an early poem on interaction /
interrelations of our faculties / thoughts
and emotions. (Cook 75, 156)
The interaction of imagination and
reality can produce a poem in which
words connect free of the real /
denotational context in strange
combinations.
This offers Stevens specific flavor
coming from unusual, colorful, witty
mixtures that have a staying power.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
Blackbirds are mentioned in a early
letter as one of the Pleasant Things
to drive dull care away. (Letters 112,
1908 qtd. in Cook 75)
The numbered sections of short-line
free verse are frequently compared
with Japanese haiku and tanka in
their effects. (Ibid.)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
The blackbird acts in each section to bring out
the meaning of the context in which it is
involved.
Its meaning depends on each context, just as the
meaning of the context depends on it. It does
not have a constant signification but it has a
constant function: to act as a focus that brings
qualities in what is put in relation with it.
The poem is unified only by what the figure of
the blackbird has suggested to the proliferating
imagination. (Wallace Stevens: Musing the
Obscure. Ronald Sukenick. New York: New York
University Press, 1967, 72)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
The difficulty of understanding the sections
comes from the fact that the descriptions and
statements are abstracted from any larger
context.
The defined reference is limited to the section;
the suggestive one is unusually large. Rigid overinterpretation is dangerous.
One should try to tell what kind of imaginative
statement is expressed / in which way it appeals
to imagination. There may be no specific
meaning beyond this / there may be an indefinite
range of meanings suggested. (Sukenick 72)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
The poem can be considered a series of
examples of how the imagination works. Some
sections are figurative statements about the
workings of the imagination.
Others are instances of imagination. In the latter
case one must be content to accept the image or
comparison presented.
Rational interpretations would move away from
the very purpose of the poem: a plea for the
freedom of imagination.
The last section of Six Significant Landscapes
clarifies Stevens understanding of the relation
between the rational mind and imagination:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird

Rationalists, wearing square hats,

Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones. Waving lines, ellipses
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
(The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New
York, 1954

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird

In this poem there are degrees in kind of imaginative

statement, from those which are figurative to those whose
meaning is ultimately ambiguous, but which for that reason
are highly suggestive.
Sections I and IX: a description in which the eye of the
blackbird provides a focal point for a landscape which it
composes, in the sense that a compositional center
composes a landscape painting.
The blackbird serves as point that orders what surrounds it
[similar composition in The Anecdote of the Jar]
The mind orders reality by perceiving significant relations
within it, as the artist re-organizes it imaginatively.
The blackbird, seen as a point of reference, defines an
intelligible area among many possible, undefined, ones.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a

Blackbird
Other meanings of the black bird in the poem:
Section II: the blackbird is used as the comparative
term in a simile.(Sukenick 74)
Section III: a specific image that represents a
general phenomenon, a synecdoche for autumn. The
blackbirds pantomime suggests autumn also as a
show where the birds whirl is one performance.
Section IV: the stereotype of the common
denominator made strange and, in this way, revived.
(Mindra)
Section V: what gives more aesthetic pleasure, the
obvious changes/additions/artistic manifestatons
(inflections) or those hinted at/inferred
(innuendoes).

James Langston Hughes (190267)

first volumes of verse The Weary

Blues ( 1926) and Fine Clothes to the
Jew (1927)
Hughes published seventeen volumes
of verse, eleven plays, three
collections of short stories, four
collections of the folk wisdom of
Jesse B. Semple, several anthologies,
librettos, and radio scripts, numerous
books for children, and articles, as
well as two novels: Not Without
Laughter ( 1930) and Tambourines to
Glory ( 1958).
Not Without Laughter is the story of a
black boy growing up in Stanton, a
small Kansas town, in the 1920s; he
chooses Booker T. Washington, W. E.
B. Du Bois, and Frederick Douglass
as his heroes
Tambourines to Glory is a comic
novel about the attitude of simple
black urban folk toward religion (13133)

James Langston Hughes

(1902-67)
The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to

express our individual dark-skinned selves without
fear or shame. If white people are please we are glad.
If they are not, it doesnt matter. We know we are
beautiful. And ugly, too. () If colored people are
pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their
displeasure doesnt matter either. We build our
temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and
we stand on top of the mountain, free within
ourselves.
Emphasis on the validity of the individual vision =
modernist.
New ethnic / national identity ethnic modernism;
see definition of blackness in The Negro Speaks of
Rivers.

James Langston Hughes

(1902-67)
In the same essay he formulates his position on the
black aesthetic:

the impasse = the hegemony of American white culture

(figured as the "racial mountain") over representations of
"race.
he particularly finds middle class black artists, who have
been taught through their education and social milieu to
emulate white culture, denying their racial identity and
heritage.
Working class blacks, on the other hand, are the
repositories of an authentic black culture, since they "still
hold their own individuality" and can furnish black artists
with the proper subject (black life) and expressive forms
(jazz, blues, spirituals, folk music).
E.g.: Mother to Son
one of the variants of ethnic modernisms of the 1920s
1930s.

James Langston Hughes

(1902-67)
the chief responsibility of the black writer: to
produce a racial literature drawn from African
American life and culture.
idealistic conception of spiritual freedom in the
land of Jim Crow, and of the future "temples,:
art as a way to gain equal citizenship in the U.S.
version of the high modernist belief in the
transfigurative power of art.

Formal experiments in poetry: jazz inflections

/rhythms in poetry (repetitions & variations on a
theme)
Part of the Harlem Renaissance (see details in
Lecture 5)