“Sidelights”
of Congress, however, made no offer to extend the appointment through the following year.
While Williams may have felt abandoned when few came to his defense during the Library of Congress incident, little could have bolstered him the way the cult of third generation poets did when they adopted him as their father in poetry. “Paterson is our Leaves of Grass,” announced Robert Lowell. “The times have changed.” And indeed they had. The dominant school of poetry, the academic school of Eliot and Allen Tate, was giving way to what Whittemore called the fifties’ “Revolution of the Word.” Such poets as Lowell, Allen Ginsburg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creely, and Cid Corman found in Williams an alternative to the academics. As Bruce Cook explained, Williams “withstood the influence of Eliot, ignored the New Critics and the academic poets who followed their lead, and simply went his own way, his lines growing shorter, more austere, more pointed with each poem.” With this style, reported James Dickey, he appealed to many aspiring writers who looked at his work and said, “Well if that’s poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!” But while the younger poets, including the Beats, found a prophet, a father, and a personal friend in Williams, the old master was no easy critic. “It was Williams who told Ginsberg that `Howl’ needed cutting by half,” disclosed Linda Wagner. “It was Williams who argued with Denise Levertov about her sometimes too-poetic dict
According to Williams himself, his own special gift to the new poets was his “variable foot–the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American.” He revealed his enthusiasm over the variable foot in a 1955 letter to John Thirlwall: “As far as I know, as my forthcoming book [Journey to Love] makes clear, I shall use no other form for the rest of my life, for it represents the culmination of all my striving after an escape from the restrictions of all the verse of the past.” Breslin, meanwhile, downplayed Williams’s exuberance: “A reader coming to these poems [in The Desert Music and Other Poems] across the whole course of Williams’s development will recognize that the new line is simply one manifestation of a pervasive shift of style and point of view.” Whittemore, too, while heralding Williams as a prophet in the “Revolution of the Word,” de-emphasized the role of the variable foot: “In other words the variable foot represented a change in mood more than measure.”
Williams’s health accounts for a major change in mood. In the late 1940s he suffered the first of several heart attacks and strokes which would plague him for the rest of his life. And though Williams later complained of the effects of a particularly serious stroke (1952)–”That was the end. I was through with life”–his devotion to poetry did not suffer. Breslin reported that after retiring from medicine in 1951, and after recuperating from a stroke, Williams spoke “optimistically of the `opportunity for thought’ and reading afforded by his new idleness.” Hofstadter pointed out that “death was a major focus of this reflectiveness,” and explained how Williams reflected his concerns in his poetry: “In the face of death what Williams seeks is renewal–not a liberation toward another world but an intensified return to this one. Revitalization both of one’s inner energies and of one’s contact with the outside world, renewal is the product of two forces: love and the imagination…. Love and imagination are the essence of life. He who loses them is as good as dead.”
Williams explored the theme of renewed love in two particular later works, the play A Dream of Love and the poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” In A Dream of Love the protagonist has an affair with his secretary and confesses to his wife that he did it only to “renew our love.” The explanation fails to convince her. Thus, Williams dramatizes his belief in the “conflict between the male’s need for emotional renewal in love and the female’s need for constancy in love,” explained Guimond. According to Thomas Whitaker, “`A Dream of Love’ points to an actuality that Williams at this time could not fully face but that he would learn to face–most noticeably in `Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.’” In this “elegiac epithalamian,” Williams confesses his infidelities to his wife and asks for her forgiveness; “he seeks new life on the very edge of death,” said Whitaker. While Williams proclaimed his life as a husband in his love poem, his strength as a poet was evident, too: “Asphodel” received some very complimentary reviews, including W. H. Auden’s praise as “one of the most beautiful poems in the language.”
“Asphodel” was among several of Williams’s highly esteemed later works. Prior to his 1952 stroke he had been under a taxing three-book contract at Random House, a contract he fulfilled with The Build Up, Autobiography, and Make Light of It. The hurried writing of the Autobiography, evidenced by its many factual mistakes, as well as the worry over the Library of Congress debacle, have both been cited as contributing factors in his declining health.
But Williams’s weakened physical powers, apparently, strengthened his creative ones. “I think he did much better work after the stroke slowed him down,” reflected Flossie. Stanley Koehler agreed. The Desert Music and Journey to Love, he said, “were written in an unusual period of recovery of creative power after Dr. Williams’s first serious illness in 1952.” Aside from featuring the variable foot and such outstanding poems as “Asphodel,” these two books impressed readers as the mature work of a poet very much in control of his life and craft. Reviewing Desert Music, Kenneth Rexroth called the title poem “an explicit statement of the irreducible humaneness of the human being.” The book’s ideas are “simple, indisputable, presented with calm maturity,” continued Rexroth. “I prophesy that from now on, as Williams grows older, he will rise as far above his contemporaries as Yeats did in his later years.” The love poems of Journey to Love were no less impressive to Babette Deutsch. “The poet gives us vignettes of the daily scene, notations on the arts, affirmations of a faith no less sublime for being secular, in the language, the rhythms, that he has made his own,” reported Deutsch. “The pages bear the indelible signature of his honesty, his compassion, his courage.” Finally, to highlight a decade of productivity, Williams’s last book, Pictures From Brueghel, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963.
Despite his failing health, Williams lived as productively as possible throughout his later years. He traveled, gave lectures, and entertained writers in the same home that had been visited by members of the Imagist movement more than forty years earlier. Williams wrote, too–poetry, of course, as well as essays and short stories. He continued to cooperate with writers interested in him and his work: John Thirlwall worked with him in the publication of Selected Letters and a series of discussions with Edith Heal became the “autobiography” of his works, I Wanted to Write a Poem. A partially paralyzing stroke in 1958 and a 1959 cancer operation, however, stole much of his remaining energy and capabilities. No longer able to read, by the end of the decade he depended on Floss to read to him, often as long as four hours a day. A particularly painful view of the aging Williams appeared in his 1962 interview with Stanley Koehler for the Paris Review. “The effort it took the poet to find and pronounce words can hardly be indicated here,” reported Koehler. Continued failing health further slowed Williams until, on March 4, 1963, he died in his sleep.
Bibliography
FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
BOOKS
· Ahearn, Barry, William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
· Angoff, Charles, editor, William Carlos Williams (papers by four critics), Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974.
· Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese, Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams, MacMillan, 1994.
· Berry, S. L., William Carlos Williams, Creative Education, 1997.
· Breslin, James E., William Carlos Williams: An American Artist, Oxford University Press, 1970.
· Brinnin, John Malcolm, William Carlos Williams, University of Minnesota Press, 1963.
· Cambon, Glauco, The Inclusive Flame: Studies in American Poetry, Indiana University Press, 1963.
· Cirasa, Robert J., The Lost Works of William Carlos Williams: The Volumes of Collected Poerty as Lyrical Sequences, Associated University Presses, 1995.
· Coles, Robert, William Carlos Williams: The Knack of Survival in America, Rutgers University Press, 1975.
· Comens, Bruce, Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky, University of Alabama Press, 1995.
· Conarroe, Joel, “Paterson”: Language and Landscape, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.
· Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929, Gale, 1989.
· Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973; Volume 2, 1974; Volume 5, 1976; Volume 9, 1978; Volume 13, 1980; Volume 22, 1982; Volume 42, 1987; Volume 67, 1991.
· Cook, Bruce, The Beat Generation, Scribner, 1971.
· Cushman, Stephen, William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure, Yale University Press, 1985.
· Dekle, Bernard, Profiles of Modern American Authors, Tuttle, 1969.
· Deutsch, Babette, Poetry in Our Time, Holt, 1952.
· Dickey, James, Babel to Byzantium, Farrar, Straus, 1968.
· Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939, 1980; Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, 1983, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880- 1945, Third Series, 1987, Volume 86:American Short Story Writers, 1910-1945, First Series, Gale, 1989.
· Dijkstra, Bram, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Princeton University Press, 1969.
· Donoghue, Denis, The Ordinary Universe, Macmillan, 1968.
· Doyle, Charles, ed., William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
· Driscoll, Kerry, William Carlos Williams and the Maternal Muse, UMI Research Press, 1987.
· Duffy, Bernard, Poetry in America: Expression and Its Values in the Times of Bryant, Whitman, and Pound, Duke University Press, 1978.
· Ellman, Richard and Robert O’Clair, editors, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Norton, 1973.
· Engels, John, Guide to William Carlos Williams, Merrill, 1969.
· Flinn, Anthony, Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams, Bucknell University Press, 1997.
· Gregory, Elizabeth, Quotation and Modern American Poetry: Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads, Rice University Press, 1995.
· Guimond, James, The Art of William Carlos Williams: A Discovery and Possession of America, University of Illinois Press, 1968.
· Halter, Peter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
· Hartman, Charles, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, Il.), 1996.
· Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age, Knopf-Vintage, 1953.
· Jarrell, The Third Book of Criticism, Farrar, Straus, 1969.
· Kinnahan, Linda A., Poetics of Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
· Koch, Vivienne, William Carlos Williams, New Directions, 1950.
· Koehler, Stanley, Countries of the Mind: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Bucknell University Press, 1998.
· Larson, Kelli A., Guide to the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Prentice-Hall, 1995.
· Laughlin, James, Remembering William Carlos Williams, New Directions, 1995.
· Lenhart, Gary, The Teachers &Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams, Teachers &Writers Collaborative, 1998.
· Lowney, John, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory, Bucknell University Press, 1996.
· Malkoff, Karl, Escape From the Self: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Columbia University Press, 1977.
· Mariani, Paul L., William Carlos Williams: The Poet and His Critics, American Library Association, 1975.
· Markos, Donald W., Ideas in Things: The Poems of William Carlos Williams, Associated University Presses (London), 1994.
· Marsh, Alec, Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson, University of Alabama Press, 1998.
· Marzan, Julio, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams, University of Texas Press, 1994.
· Mazzaro, Jerome, William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems, Cornell University Press, 1973.
· Mester, Terri A., Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early Twentieth-century Dance, University of Arkansas Press, 1997.
· Miller, J. Hillis, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965.
· Miller, J. Hillis, editor, William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1966.
· Morris, Daniel, The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self, University of Missouri Press, 1995.
· Nardi, Marcia, The Last Word: Letters Between Marcia Nardi and William Carlos Williams, University of Iowa Press, 1994.
· Ostrom, Alan, The Poetic World of William Carlos Williams, Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.
· Owen, Guy, editor, Modern American Poetry: Essays in Criticism, Everett/Edwards, 1972.
· Paul, Sherman, The Music of Survival: A Biography of a Poem by William Carlos Williams, University of Illinois Press, 1968.
· Perkins, David, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890’s to the High Modernist Mode, Harvard University Press, 1976.
· Peterson, Walter S., An Approach to “Paterson,” Yale University Press, 1967.
· Poetry Criticism, Gale, Vol. 7, pp. 343-413.
· Qian, Zhaoming, Orientalism and Modernisn: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, Duke University Press, 1995.
· Rexroth, Kenneth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Herder, 1971.
· Riddel, Joseph N., The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams, Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
· Rodgers, Audrey T., The Image of Women in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Gordian Press, 1966.
· Rosenthal, M. L., The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1960.
· Shapiro, Karl, In Defense of Ignorance, Random House, 1960.
· Simpson, Louis, Three on the Tower: The Lives and Works of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, Morrow, 1975.
· Stauffer, Donald Barlow, A Short History of American Poetry, Dutton, 1974.
· Sutton, Walter, American Free Verse: The Modern Revolution in Poetry, New Directions, 1973.
· Townley, Rod, The Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Cornell University Press, 1975.
· Ungar, Leonard, editor, Seven Modern American Poets: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1967.
· Waggoner, Hyatt H., American Poetry From the Puritans to the Present, Houghton, 1968.
· Wagner, Linda Welshimer, editor, Interviews With William Carlos Williams: “Speaking Straight Ahead,” New Directions, 1976.
· Wagner, The Poems of William Carlos Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1964.
· Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1970.
· Wagner, William Carlos Williams: A Reference Guide, G. K. Hall, 1978.
· Weatherhead, A. Kingsley, The Edge of the Image: Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Some Other Poets, University of Washington Press, 1967.
· Weaver, Mike, William Carlos Williams: The American Background, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
· Whitaker, Thomas R., William Carlos Williams, Twayne, 1968.
· Whittemore, Reed, William Carlos Williams: Poet From New Jersey, Houghton, 1975.
· Williams, William Carlos, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, New Directions, 1967.
· Williams, Imaginations, edited by Webster Schott, New Directions, 1970.
· Williams, Paterson, Books I-V, New Directions, 1963.
· Williams, Selected Essays, Random House, 1954.
· Williams, Selected Letters, edited by John C. Thirlwall, McDowell, Obolensky, 1957.
· Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, third series, introduction by Alfred Kazin, Viking, 1967.
PERIODICALS
· American Imago, Spring, 1993.
· The American Poetry Review, September-October, 1985.
· Atlantic Monthly, October, 1951; September, 1957; May, 1958; July, 1959.
· Boundary 2, Winter, 1981.