PARTISAN REVIEW
Ezra plain, who dates back to the almost unimaginable heyday of Imagism,
and who has persisted (unlike the Hammetts, to be sure), uncommercial–
ized, doggedly outliving•he little reviews that have continued to print
him. That modernist poetry has already survived long enough to have
produced Old Men, is a fact that in itself constantly astounds us, and
we fail perhaps to evaluate·them precisely, carried away by our adulation
of them as original Witnesses.
But it is with Williams' unswerving sentimentality, his role of the
hard-shelled doctor with the secret sympathetic heart, that we must
begin: his sentimentalization of the working-class, bulls, the New Jersey
landscape-and the balancing crustiness: the crabbed forms, the use of
anti-poetic detail, the guttural grunts, the constant self-mockery, in
short, the attributes of realism.
That we have had only this one respectable realistic poet in twentieth–
century America confuses us; we are always lumping Williams with the
wrong people, for it seems utterly improbable that one highly admired
by, say, Wallace Stevens, could have radically less in common with him
than with the obsolescent Carl Sandburg-and, of course, there is the
bent and coloration given once and for all to the realism of Williams
by the Imagist movement and the Japanese short poem as they imper–
fectly understood it. "lmagism"-the word comes up out of that dark–
ness in which we store a handy vocabulary for discussing
(if
improbably
pushed to it) what no longer interests us-and clinging to it the dead
and the mad and the honest: Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound and W. C.
Williams. Well, we like to think of Pound; madness has been at least
optional among poets for a long time-but Amy Lowell!
Yet we cannot reject what Williams' astonishing persistence evokes
-the questionable ghost of
vers libre,
the tyranny of the eye. The realist
is ultimately the
voyeur-for
seeing is the most literal of the senses, the
remotest from abstract or symbolic thought ("No ideas but in things,"
Williams intones at the beginning of
Paterson,
his lifelong credo), and
it is the happiest of coincidences that the Hammett hero is the Private
Eye, precisely as in the center of Williams' long poem the watcher whose
vision makes the body of his world: the Shamus, the Private Eye, un–
noticed epiphanies imbedded in our speech.
What the exploitation of that single sense, plus an unmitigated
honesty, can do, Williams has done all right, and the simple devotion
to seeing gives to some of his poems a magnificent, a manic vividness.
But how far can you go on
one
sense! This is not quite fair, perhaps;
though the visual obsesses Williams, sounds occasionally touch
him:
the noise of water, the mythic pissing of his Falls, grunts, the thick
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