Surrounded by criticism, Williams became increasingly defensive during this time. His prologue to Kora came from his need “to give some indication of myself to the people I knew; sound off, tell the world– especially my intimate friends–how I felt about them.” With or without allies, Williams was determined to continue the advances he felt he had made in American poetry.
What Williams did not foresee, however, was the “atom bomb” on modern poetry–T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Williams had no quarrel with Eliot’s genius–he said Eliot was writing poems as good as Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”–but, simply, “we were breaking the rules, whereas he was conforming to the excellencies of classroom English.” As he explained in his Autobiography, “I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years and I’m sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself–rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.” Not only did Williams feel threatened by Eliot’s success, but also by the attention The Waste Land received. As Karl Shapiro pointed out, “he was left high and dry: Pound, who was virtually the co- author of Eliot’s poems, and Marianne Moore were now polarized to Eliot. Williams felt this and would feel it for another twenty years. His own poetry would have to progress against the growing orthodoxy of Eliot criticism.” But while the Eliot wave undoubtedly sank his spirits, at the same time it buoyed his determination: “It was a shock to me that he was so tremendously successful,” Williams admitted. “My contemporaries flocked to him–away from what I wanted. It forced me to be successful.”
According to Breslin, The Waste Land was one of the “major influence[s] on that remarkable volume,” Williams’s next book, Spring and All. The last in a decade of experimental poetry, Spring and All viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot but interpreted it differently. Williams “saw his poetic task was to affirm the self- reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world,” Stauffer noted. “But unlike Eliot, who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth.”
Fox explained how Williams used the imagination to do just that: “Williams… sees the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder.” Williams himself explained in one of Spring and All’s prose passages that “imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it a description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it–It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but–.”
Just as meeting Pound had measurably affected Williams’s early life, the appearance of Eliot’s The Waste Land marked important changes in his mid-career. Though some of Williams’s finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All, he did not release another book of poems for nearly ten years. “One reason,” speculated Rod Townley, “was probably Eliot’s success. Another may have been his own success, known only to a few, in Spring and All. For decades thereafter he could not outdo himself; some think he never did.” Instead, Williams wrote prose. And in it he concentrated on one subject in particular: America.
Williams explained his attraction towards America in a 1939 letter to Horace Gregory: “Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressedly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it.” He later echoed this sentiment in his preface to Selected Essays. “I loved my father but never forgave him for remaining, in spite of everything, a British subject,” Williams admitted. “It had much to do with my sometimes violent partisanship towards America.” As a result of such feelings, reasoned Vivienne Koch, “the logic of Williams’ allegiance to the quest for a knowledge of localism, for a defining of the American grain, has compelled in his fiction a restriction to American materials.”
So, in In the American Grain, Williams tried “to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify” by examining the “original records” of “some of the American founders.” In its treatment of the makers of American history, ranging from Columbus to Lincoln, In the American Grain has impressed many as Williams’s most succinct definition of America and its people. D. H. Lawrence, for example, learned from Williams that “there are two ways of being American, and the chief… is by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the Puritan way. The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way.” Another prose book of the period, A Voyage to Pagany, was a type of travel book based on the author’s 1924 trip to Europe. “While its subject matter is essentially Europe,” informed Koch, “it is, in reality, an assessment of that world through the eyes of America too.” Williams focused directly on America and the Depression in his aptly titled short story collection, The Knife of the Times. In these stories and in other similar works of the thirties, “Williams blamed the inadequacies of American culture for both the emotional and economic plight of many of his subjects,” declared James Guimond.
Williams’s novel trilogy, White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up, also focused on America, and on one family in particular–his wife’s. He first conceived the idea for White Mule because he wanted to write about a baby–he delivered more than two thousand in his career–and had heard stories of Floss’s babyhood. But beyond the story of the infant Floss Stecher is the story of her infant American family, immigrants growing toward success in America. Philip Rahv gave this description of Joe and Gurlie Stecher: “Gurlie is so rife with the natural humors of a wife that she emerges as a veritable goddess of the home, but since it is an American home she is constantly urging her husband to get into the game, beat the other fellow, and make money. Joe’s principal motivation, however, is his pride of workmanship; he is the pure artisan, the man who has not yet been alienated from the product of his labor and who thinks of money as the reward of labor and nothing else.” In In the Money Williams follows Joe as he establishes his own printing business and moves to the suburbs, making way for the picture of middle-class life he presents in The Build-Up. W. T. Schott gave these examples of Williams’s focus: “The stolid admirable Joe, the arrogant Gurlie on her upward march in society, a neighbor woman ranting her spitefulness,… Flossie and her sister at their little-girl wrangling over bathroom privileges.” Reed Whittemore felt that such moments reveal Williams’s fond tolerance of middle-class life. The Build-Up does have its “tough sections,” Whittemore admitted, but “its placidness is striking for a book written by a long-time literary dissenter. What it is is a book of complacent reflection written from inside apple-pie America. It has not the flavor of the letters of the real young doctor-poet sitting in his emptiness forty years earlier in Leipzig…. Between 1909, then, and the time of the writing of The Build-Up WCW was taken inside, and found that with reservations he liked it there.”
One reservation Williams may have had about middle-class America–and Rutherford in particular–was its reception of him as a poet. Few in Rutherford had any awareness of who Williams-the-poet was, and beyond Rutherford his reputation fared no better: even after he had been writing for nearly thirty years, he was still virtually an unknown literary figure. Rod Townley reported a typical public response to his early works: “The world received his sixth and seventh books as it had the five before them, in silence.” At times, Williams took a resilient view of his own obscurity. In a 1938 letter to Alva Turner (one of the many amateur poets with whom he frequently corresponded), Williams assessed the profits of the pen: “Meanwhile I receive in royalties for my last two books the munificent sum of one hundred and thirty dollars–covering the work of a ten or fifteen year period, about twelve dollars a year. One must be a hard worker to be able to stand up under the luxury of those proportions. Nothing but the best for me!” Beneath the shell of this attitude, though, lay a much angrier Williams. Obviously bitter about the success of Eliot and the attention Eliot stole from him and others, Williams wrote, “Our poems constantly, continuously and stupidly were rejected by all the pay magazines except Poetry and The Dial.” As a result, Williams founded and edited several magazines of his own throughout the lean years. Until the 1940s and after, when his work finally received some popular and critical attention, the magazines provided a small but important readership.
While the many years of writing may have gone largely unnoticed, they were hardly spent in vain: Breslin revealed that “Williams spent some thirty years of living and writing in preparation for Paterson.” And though some dismiss the “epic” label often attached to the five-book poem, Williams’s intentions were certainly beyond the ordinary. His devotion to understanding his country, its people, its language–”the whole knowable world about me”–found expression in the poem’s central image, defined by Whittemore as “the image of the city as a man, a man lying on his side peopling the place with his thoughts.” With roots in his 1926 poem “Paterson,” Williams took the city as “my `case’ to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the `thought.’”
In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained “that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his 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. M. Sullivan outlined why Williams chose Paterson, New Jersey: It was once “the prototype of the American industrial community… the self-sustaining city of skills with the competitive energy and moral stamina to lift the burdens of the citizen and raise the livelihood with social and cultural benefits.” One hundred years later, continued Sullivan, “Williams saw the Hamilton concept [of `The Society of Useful Manufacturers'] realized, but with mixed results of success and misery. The poet of Paterson understood the validity of the hopes of Hamilton but also recognized that the city slum could be the price of progress in a mechanized society.” The world Williams chose to explore in this poem about “the myth of American power,” added James Guimond, was one where “this power is almost entirely evil, the destructive producer of an America grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation.”
Williams revealed “the elemental character of the place” in Book I. The time is spring, the season of creativity, and Paterson is struck by the desire to express his “immediate locality” clearly, observed Guimond. The process is a struggle: to know the world about him Paterson must face both the beauty of the Passaic Falls and the poverty of the region. In Book II, said Williams, Paterson moves from a description of “the elemental character” of the city to its “modern replicas.” Or, as Guimond pointed out, from the “aesthetic world” to the “real material world where he must accomplish the poet’s task as defined in Book I–the invention of a language for his locality…. The breakdown of the poet’s communication with his world is a disaster,” both for himself and for others. Williams himself, on the other hand, made his own advance in communication in Book II, a “milestone” in his development as a poet. A passage in Section 3, beginning “The descent beckons…,” “brought about–without realizing it at the time– my final conception of what my own poetry should be.” The segment is one of the earliest examples of Williams’s innovative method of line division, the “variable foot.”
To invent the new language, Paterson must first “descend from the erudition and fastidiousness that made him impotent in Book II,” summarized Guimond. As Paterson reads–and reflects–in a library, he accepts the destruction in Book II, rejects his learning, and realizes “a winter of `death’ must come before spring.” Williams believed that “if you are going to write realistically of the concept of filth in the world it can’t be pretty.” And so, Book IV is the dead season, symbolized by the “river below the falls,” the polluted Passaic. But in this destruction, the poet plants some seeds of renewal: a young virtuous nurse; a Paterson poet, Allen Ginsburg, who has promised to give the local new meaning; Madame Curie, “divorced from neither the male nor knowledge.” At the conclusion of Book IV, a man, after a long swim, dresses on shore and heads inland–”toward Camden,” Williams said, “where Walt Whitman, much traduced, lived the later years of his life and died.” These seeds of hope led Breslin to perceive the basic difference between Paterson and Williams’s long-time nemesis, Eliot’s Waste Land. “`The Waste Land’ is a kind of anti-epic,” Breslin said, “a poem in which the quest for meaning is entirely thwarted and we are left, at the end, waiting for the collapse of Western civilization. Paterson is a pre-epic, showing that the process of disintegration releases forces that can build a new world. It confronts, again and, again, the savagery of contemporary society, but still affirms a creative seed. Eliot’s end is Williams’s beginning.”
Williams scrapped his plans for a four-book Paterson when he recognized not only the changes in the world, but “that there can be no end to such a story I have envisioned with the terms which I have laid down for myself.” To Babette Deutsch, Book V “is clearly not something added on, like a new wing built to extend a house, but something that grew, as naturally as a green branch stemming from a sturdy ole tree…. This is inevitably a work that reviews the past, but it is also one that stands firmly in the present and looks toward the future…. `Paterson Five’ is eloquent of a vitality that old age cannot quench. Its finest passages communicate Dr. Williams’s perennial delight in walking in the world.” Book VI was in the planning stages at the time of Williams’s death.
While Williams himself declared that he had received some “gratifying” compliments about Paterson, Breslin reported “reception of the poem never exactly realized his hopes for it.” Paterson’s mosaic structure, its subject matter, and its alternating passages of poetry and prose helped fuel criticism about its difficulty and its looseness of organization. In the process of calling Paterson an “`Ars Poetica’ for contemporary America,” Dudley Fitts complained, “it is a pity that those who might benefit most from it will inevitably be put off by its obscurities and difficulties.” Breslin, meanwhile, accounted for the poem’s obliqueness by saying, ” Paterson has a thickness of texture, a multi-dimensional quality that makes reading it a difficult but intense experience.”
Paterson did help bring Williams some of the attention he had been missing for many years. One honor came in 1949 when he was invited to become consultant to the Library of Congress. Whittemore reported that Williams first refused the appointment because of poor health, but decided in 1952 that he was ready to assume the post. Unfortunately for Williams, the editor and publisher of the poetry magazine Lyric got word of Williams’s appointment and subsequently announced Williams’s “Communist” affiliations. Williams’s poem “Russia,” she insisted, spoke in “the very voice of Communism.” Though few newspapers brought the charges to light, the Library of Congress suddenly backed off from the appointment. After several excuses and postponements, some made, ostensibly, out of a concern for Williams’s health, Librarian Luther Evans wrote, “I accordingly hereby revoke the offer of appointment heretofore made to you.” A few months before the term was to have ended, Williams learned that the appointment had been renewed. The Library