PARTISAN REVIEW
tumescence or detumescence) perhaps defines an ulterior meaning of
Williams' form.
What on the face of it seems more incredible than that the supreme
practitioner of the reduced poem among us should be tempted toward
the Long Poem; what seems less probable than his success, especially
when he proposes, who has fled all but the sentimental-ironic picture,
a dissertation on the mythic city and the definition of man-tempted
toward philosophy as well as discursiveness. And yet here in hand is
the second volume of
Paterson,
already substantially realized, in the
most literal sense-a wonder! To be sure, there was a form ready to
solve the dilemma of the short breath and the long intent without
teaching an old dog new tricks of substantial structure; the pattern had
long been set for what I suppose we might as well call the Ezra-istic
poem: the collage of fragments whose architecture is a continuing irony
of disjunction, set once and for all when Pound revised for Eliot
The
Wastelll'Tld,
confirmed in Pound's own
Cantos
and in
The Bridge
of
Hart Crane. It has been a long time since any serious poet among us
has attempted any other strategy for the long poem-and we recognize
the convention in Williams, adhered to with a basic conservatism that
gives his poem a classic, an expected air. Here are the rapid shifts in
point of view, the urban subject, the intruded quotations, the counter–
point of a formal diction and the overheard brutalities of common
speech; here are the harsh distorted forms and the Greek allusion to
justify the fallacy of imitative form (sufficient unto the day is the in–
coherence thereof) that prompts them.
It is so far a work with real virtues, above all a kind of unflagging
candor, a freshness of vision from which Williams astonishingly does not
wither, and all the charm of a personality that at his age he can afford
to inflict upon us with a lucid self-confidence unavailable to the young.
He is, as we say, a self-made man. There is a certain appeal too in his
conjunction of a radical vagueness of ideas and a sensual precision, real
charm in his respect for language, his ironic and tender regionalism. But
the poem's faults are even now apparent, disturbing: the lack of a felt
necessity in its transitions and conjunctions, and a pervading wilfulness,
a self-indulgence most usually discreet, but occasionally blatant as in its
injection into the work's progress of some old letter given at needless
length, or even an impassioned irrelevance about Lilienthal and the
"guilty bastards" in our Senate completely out of the poem's time,
assailing its fictive integrity. It is doubtful
if
in the end the total credibil–
ity of the poem can survive such lapses;
if
we think even for a moment,
"Padding!"-all is imperilled. Besides, the old faults persist: the polar
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