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William Carlos Williams, part 2
In his work from 1948 through 1962 (he died in ‘63), Williams brought his career to a glorious peak.
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”
IMHO this is the greatest poem ever written. From here on, I quote from my Wikipedia entry on his 1955 book Journey to Love: The crowning poem of the collection is “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” about which entire books have been written. By far the longest piece in the volume at thirty pages, this four-part pastoral love poem was originally envisioned as the fifth book of Paterson. He began writing it in 1952 in the midst of health problems physical (a heart attack and multiple strokes that left him, among other things, with periods of near-blindness and partially paralyzed, able to type only with one hand) and mental (depression). Facing death, he confessed old adulteries to his wife. In this context, he wrote “one of the most beautiful affirmations of the power of love in—and against—the nuclear age, and one of the few memorable love poems in English written not for a mistress but for a wife.” (The quote is from Fisher-Wirth, Ann. “Williams’s ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 2001.) [Hmm…is this the first Big Takeover list with a footnote? Am I insufferably pretentious yet?]
Paterson, Book V, Part III
Paterson occupied much of WCW’s time from the mid-’40s until the end of his life in 1963; he never finished it, in that he was working on adding a sixth book, though the five completed parts are not even slightly diminished by his late wish to add another. It is an oddly structured mixture of poetry, prose, references to his old work, and quotations from history books, people’s letters, an interview by Mike Wallace of WCW, etc. Often it seems unabashedly mundane, sometimes intentionally ugly; it is a book-length work that achieves its effect cumulatively. That said, the final section of the last completed book attains a paradoxical grandeur, starting with an anti-authoritarian view of the Nativity as seen through Breughel’s painting of the scene transported to his own time and place, and concluding with the poet’s statement of purpose. WCW draws a deliberate parallel between Breughel and himself, depicters of the common people finding more meaning in their lives than in the lives of the high and mighty. Wending his way through other thoughts, he starts to close with an extended metaphor growing out of the famous unicorn tapestries until it suddenly switches over to a reminiscence of his grandmother and then finishes with another declaration about one of his consuming obsessions, rhythm:
We know nothing and can know nothing .
but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
Satyrically, the tragic foot.
“The Descent”
First appearing in 1948 in Book Two, Part III of Paterson, this was WCW’s first poem combining his “variable foot” with “stepped triadic line.” He came to see it as the breakthrough in poetic form that he had spent most of his career looking for to properly capture the American cadence that was so integral to his conception of what American poetry should be. He employed it, with some variations, in almost of the poems in his mid-’50s collections The Desert Music and Journey to Love, and considered “The Descent” sufficiently important that he also used it to open the former.
“To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday”
A much simpler, much shorter flower/love poem than “Asphodel,” to less epic but more direct effect. One of eight WCW poems I’ve set to music, and my favorite of them.
“The Desert Music”
Inspired by a trip from Juarez to El Paso, Williams seems to free-associate, but despite the sudden disjuctures of topic it’s all tightly conceived, and while the language is colloquial and the scenes earthy, the ideas are of the highest order.
“Pictures from Breughel”
The title cycle of his 1962 collection, the last to be published in his lifetime, expands on the Brueghel empathy touched on in Paterson (above).
“The Snow Begins”
What an opening Williams gives us:
A rain of bombs, well placed,
is no less lovely
“The Rewaking”
Another wonderful spring metaphor.
“The Orchestra”
One of the more thoughtful and perceptive poems about music.
“To a Dog Injured in the Street”
To be able to state, in the midst of nuclear terror and in contradiction to all the evidence of history, that he “…believes / in the power of beauty / to right all wrongs” is not to be naïve so much as to simultaneously aspire to a higher condition and attempt to nudge the world closer to it. I’m not sure I believe it, and I certainly know that on one level it is absolutely false, but I wish with all my heart to live my life as though I do believe it.
