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that he knows nothing about; Mr. Wheelwright knows too much about his
tags and by over-deliberation occasionally uncovers a void. Mr. Wheelwright
moves towards the kinky, the special, the wilful, the sport of thought and
spirit and form because he is so much aware of the general; Dr. Williams
moves towards the flatness of the general because he takes every object, un–
inspected, as fresh. Mr. Wheelwright deals with moral and spiritual struggle;
Dr. Williams deals with the same struggle before it has reached the level of
morals and touches on the spirit only by accident. Mr. Wheelwright reaches
the explicit through abstraction, by celebrating the fulfillment of pattern:
Habit is evil,-all habit, even speech
and promises prefigure their own breach.
Dr. Williams reaches the implicit through the concrete, by acknowledging
what he sees:
It's a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the srmrise
toward tvhich you lend no part!
There are facts about these two poets which implement our respect for their
poetry and put iron in the bias of our general regard for them as figures in
the world of our present sensibility. The facts have nothing to do with
magnitude, which is a gift of heaven, and of which our appreciation depends
as much on distance as on use. We are concerned here merely with the facts
of poetic character. There is, to begin with, the fact that Dr. Williams writes
exclusively in free verse of an extraordinarily solid and flexible species.
Further he despises traditional English metres; the sonnet he thinks good
only for doggerel, subverts most intelligences, and has, as a word, a definitely
fascistic meaning. I do not doubt that he may be right for himself; which
goes
to show only that his intellect is in him so badly proportioned that it
interferes with the operation of his sensibility. He needs to work, as it
were, under cover; needs to find his work seemingly already done for him
when he takes it up. The depth and rightness of his instinct for himself is
shown by the mastery in at least twenty poems of varying length of a form
adequate in every respect to his poetic purpose. Yvor Winters says that this
is
the form of free verse, and that it scans, has outer rules and in inner
scheme. I refer the reader to Winters'
Primitivism a11d Decadence
where the
technique of Dr. Williams' free verse is fully discussed; I cannot follow the
discussion myself, preferring to believe (until I can follow it) that Dr.
Williams' astonishing success comes from the combination of a good ear for
speech cadence and for the balance of meaning and sound, plus a facility for
the
double effect of weight and speed. When Mr. Winters (in the
Kenyon
Review,
January 1939) compares Dr. Williams to Herrick as equally in–
destructible, the justice of his comparison, if there be any, must lie in the
comparison of incongruities; for the older poet spent his life refining his
sensibility in terms of his medium, precisely as the younger has evidently
insisted
on his sensibility at the
expense
of his medium.
However that may be, what remains of Dr. Williams' medium has been
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successful for himself, that many have thought it would be successful for
anybody. We are accustomed to think of him as a fertile poet-as fruitful
in
poems for other poets to read. The pages of the poetry journals every
