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PARTISAN REVIEW
now aqd then show the results; curiously, the imitation is almost always of
the poorer or more crotchety poems. The fact is, it seems to me, that Dr.
Williams is a product of fertility.. All the signs and recognitions of fertility
in his work point backward. He is almost a reduction not a product, a re–
duction to a highly personalised style to express personal matters-a remark–
able, but sterile, sport. You can imitate him, as you can imitate anything; but
you cannot incorporate him. In short, his work adds to the sentiments but
not to the sensibility.
One reason is that almost everything in Dr. Williams' poetry, including
the rendering, is unexpanded notation. He isolates and calls attention to
what we are already presently in possession of. Observation of which any
good novelist must be constantly capable, here makes a solo appearance: the
advantage is the strength of isolation as an attention-caller to the terrible
persistence of the obvious, the unrelenting significance of the banal. Dr.
Williams perhaps tries to write as the average man-that man who even less
than the normal man hardly exists but is immanent. The conviction which
attaches to such fine poems as "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," "Youth
and Beauty," or the first section of "Spring and All," perhaps has its source,
its rationale, in our instinctive willingness to find ourselves immamently
average; just as, perhaps, the conviction attaching to tragic poetry is con–
nected with our fascinated dread of seeing ourselves as normal. Dr. Williams
has no perception of the normal; no perspective, no finality-for these in–
volve, for imaginative expression, both the intellect which he distrusts and
the imposed form which he cannot understand. What he does provide is a
constant freshness and purity of language which infects with its own quali–
ties an otherwise gratuitous exhibition of the sense and sentiment of human–
ity run-down-averaged-without a trace of significance or a vestige of fate
in the fresh familiar face.
The facts about Mr. Wheelwright are very much on the level of sig–
nificance and fate; they make the matter of his preoccupation; and as they
are delivered or aborted they make the failure or the success of his poems.
The subject is the significance of friendship and the fate of friends: "the
mirror of Venus reflects loved ones as each would be seen." The emphasis–
the feeling for pattern- is protestant-christian; divine but apprehended by
the individual. The form is that of the sonnet, varied, twisted, transformed,
restored: some inverted, some in couplets, some Shakespearean, some in
free-verse, some in blank-verse; for Mr. Wheelwright feels that a sequence
of "perfect" sonnets would produce hypnosis in the reader instead of de–
manding and controlling full attention. That may
be
so; but I observe that
all the nine sonnets that seem to me almost wholly successful depart least
from one or other of the stricter sonnet forms, and that those which seem
to me to abort their subject-matter are in free or metrically unequal verse.
(Those which seem to me successful-nine out of thirty-five--are "Abel,"
"Sanct," "Father," "Holy Saturday," "Lens," "Plus," "Phallus," "Mirror,"
and "Keeper." The worst failures, "Kin," "Parting in Harlem," and "Vil–
lage Hangover," seem to have been put in for structural reasons without
becoming part of the architecture.) Whether the imposition of external
form is responsible for the emergence of a whole pattern in these poems, I
do not know. The interesting thing is that we have the form and we have
