William Carlos Williams

...spite of R.P...

...It gives him the treatment that a major poet deserves...

...The culmination of this technique came, of course, with his epic, Pater-son...

...Here was a self-proclaimed adversary of what he called the medieval tyranny of classical learning, yet whose early heroes were Keats and Shakespeare, and who turned more than once to Dante for inspiration ("The < Yachts" alludes to a scene from The Inferno where Dante and Vergil must cut through the arms and hands of the damned, floating beneath them), and who hopscotched Europe time and again to enhance his American career...

...Had Mariani been less modest, he might have called it the Age of, Williams...

...Yet, he was an original, a magician, a poet's poet...

...Phillip Corwin IN 1921, at the age of thirty-eight, William Carlos Williams published a volume of poems entitled Sour Grapes...

...There is also evidence here of Williams's passion for using material at hand-in this case, his going out to care for a patient during a winter blizzard-as a building block for his esthetic structures...

...Eliot are...

...The final comment that begs to be made on Mariani's marvelous book is an ironic one...

...Mariani's book is so broad and so very good that any summary would be ineffective...

...In that volume was a poem, "Complaint," which began: They call me and I go It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks...

...academic currency is soft, academic brokers are bankrupt...

...And then there are also the unavoidable implications in these lines of the poet being summoned by his Muse or his audience, his accepting the call and having to travel "a frozen road" (frozen by European tradition), "past midnight" (doesn't poetry always pay heed to the dark side of life, in...

...To begin with, there is the simple language, underscoring Williams's relentless determination to draw rhythms from natural speech in order to establish a truly American poetry, rather than resort to the pedantic, traditionalist diction of those he considered academic poets, epitomized by his lifelong enemy and contemporary, T.S...

...Here was a man by nature prissy, who insisted on incorporating into his correspondence, his theories, his poetry, the chthonian cadences and epithets of the common man...

...It won't work...

...Yet each reader invariably comes away with one major impression, and for this reader, that impression is a deepened awareness of the contradictions that permeated the man's life, and of how they energized him at the point where they threatened to be most enervating...

...As a window between the old world and the new, Williams leapt at the opportunity to be accepted by the old world he was rejecting, at the same time he was denouncing the vulgarities of the new world he was chronicling...

...The cast of characters surrounding Williams is exhaustive, the biographical detail is extensive, the writing is lively and objective...

...Here was a good bourgeois who was a closet beatnik...

...and seeing the snowy dust caught in "rigid wheeltracks" as he travels on his mission of mercy (the ruts of convention being covered with the white dust of ineffectual versifiers...

...Once, in fact, during a public reading, at the age of fifty-three, Williams lamented that he still had never been able to publish a volume of prose or poetry that he had not had to subsidize...

...Here was a practicing physician who considered science to be an enemy of art, yet whose scientific eye for detail enriched his art...

...Here, too, is manifested Williams's concern for what he later called the "variable foot," actually a variable line, demonstrating his insistence on the need for a poet to use rhythms arising out of the uniqueness of each experience, rather than trying to impose classical metrics where they do not belong...

...No ideas but in things...

...Yes, Williams was bitter about his lack of recognition (Sour Grapes), and he was continually complaining...

...Eliot...

...And for all his devotion to con-creteness ("Say it...

...These few lines provide a touchstone for many of the central concerns of Williams's life and art...

...It had been a fight, a magnificent fight, against the academy, against the numbing sclerosis of the universities, against , the very scholars of the language (there were none, Williams in' sis ted), against special interests of all lands, and he had had to create a strategy and sometimes even desperate homemade measures where none had existed before...

...Blackmur's condescending and pernicious comment that Williams's poetry was devoid of any tragic dimension...

...Finally, one hopes, with the publication of this biography, the peripatetic pediatrician from New Jersey, the cantankerous enemy of logic and the Establishment, the poet who denounced and was slighted by the brokers of culture yet who wanted their approval much as a rejected child desperately wants a parent's love, perhaps finally Williams will be accorded the serious recognition he merits...

...Nor should the simple, monosyllabic structure of these lines be overlooked, the fact that of twenty-two words, eighteen are composed of one syllable, the other four being disyllables, a fact that makes the poem immediately accessible...

...Paul Mariani William Carlos Williams liams, as Auden said of Yeats, has become his admirers...

...it is a comprehensive, em-pathetic, blockbuster of a book, a War and Peace of literary activity in America for the first half of the twentieth century...

...And what Mariani has done is to allow those of us already in the Williams camp to admire the good doctor even more...

...Let there be no complaint...

...In a way, his study seems like an attempt to civilize Tom Sawyer, a hopeless task, or a proposal to nominate Williams for a chair in the non-existent Conservatory of Respectable Academic Poets (the acronym of which might have been WCW's own comment on such a proposal...

...The fact is, however, that Wil' It had indeed been quite a life: the uphill struggle of an American revolutionary to establish - against the incredible odds of neglect, misinterpretation, dismissal - an American poetic based on a new measure . and a primary regard for the livingt protean shape of the language as it was actually used...

...Now a massive new biography has come along that attempts to satisfy Williams's complaint of six decades ago...

...Perhaps he will even be included in the graduate seminars on modern poetry to the extent that his schoolmate Ezra Pound, and his nemesis T.S...

...And what of the titles, of both the poem and the volume...

...Here was a country doctor as cosmopolitan as any urban dandy...

...he devoted his energies, his integrity, his life, to developing an esthetican American idiom-that could never be anything but intangible, undefinable, and subjective...