Given that last week’s post featured Emily Dickinson, it’s fitting that this week I feature the grandson of Emily Dickinson: not the Emily Dickinson we know, but the grandmother of Dr William Carlos Williams, son of an English father and Puerto Rican mother, physician to the citizens of Rutherford NJ (where he was born, lived, and died), and one of the American poets who pioneered modernist poetry in the early 20th century.
I’m skipping the oft-parodied poems “This Is Just to Say” (about the plums) and “The Red Wheelbarrow” (also about the white chickens) and instead including one of my favorite Williams poems, “The Great Figure,” which inspired one of my favorite paintings (by Charles Demuth):
Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
Williams once wrote, “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.” Paterson, published in five “books” over several years and combining poetry and prose, was his most ambitious attempt at such a possession. It was inspired by the New Jersey mill town of the same name, then as now home to multiple waves of immigrants, then as now mired in poverty. Here are the first lines of Book I, which is titled “The Delineaments of the Giants”:
Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.
Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom
seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his
machinations
drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring
river
animate a thousand automatons. Who because they
neither know their sources nor the sills of their
disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
for the most part,
locked and forgot in their desires — unroused.
— 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 —
secret — into the body of the light!
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography and selected poems by William Carlos Williams.
- Internet Archive:
- The William Carlos Williams Reader, edited with an introduction by M. L. Rosenthal. This is probably the best single-volume introduction to Williams’ work, containing a selection of both his poems and prose.
- Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. The Internet Archive has multiple copies of this work; this is the one least marked up by the original owner.
- The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939-1962, edited by Christopher Macgowan. The Internet Archive does not appear to have a copy of Volume I; however, you can find it at Bookshop.org (see below).
- Bookshop.org:
- The William Carlos Williams Reader, edited with an introduction by M. L. Rosenthal.
- Paterson (Revised), by William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher Mcgowan.
- The Collected Poems of Wiliam Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher Macgowan. Bookshop.org does not appear to have Volume II; however, you can find it at other online bookstores.