698
PARTISAN REVIEW
Paterson (Book
1)
seemed to me a wonderful poem; I should not
have supposed beforehand that William Carlos Williams could do the
organizing and criticizing and selecting that a work of this length re–
quires. Of course, Book I is not organized quite so well as a long poem
ought
to be, but this is almost a defining characteristic of long poems–
and I do not see how anyone could do better using only those rather
mosaic organizational techniques that Dr. Williams employs, and neglect–
ting as much as he does narrative, drama, logic, and sustained move–
ment, the primary organizers of long poems. I waited for the next three
books of
Paterson
more or less as you wait for someone who has gone
to break the bank at Monte Carlo for the second, third, and fourth
times; I was afraid that I knew what was going to happen, but I kept
wishing as hard as I could that it wouldn't.
Now that Book IV has been printed
S
,
one can come to some con–
clusions about
Paterson
as a whole. My first conclusion is this: it doesn't
seem to
be
a whole; my second:
Paterson
has been getting rather steadily
worse. Most of Book IV is much worse than II and III, and neither of
them even begins to compare with Book I. Book IV is so disappointing
that I do not want to write about it at any length: it would not
satisfactorily conclude even a quite mediocre poem. Both form and
content often seem a parody of those of the "real"
Paterson;
many
sections have a scrappy inconsequence, an arbitrary irrelevance, that is
extraordinary; poetry of the quality of that in Book I is almost com–
pletely lacking-though the forty lines about a new Odysseus coming
in from the sea are particularly good, and there are other fits and
starts of excellence. There are in Part III long sections of a measure
that sounds exactly like the stuff you produce when you are demon–
strating to a class that any prose whatsoever can be converted into
four-stress accentual verse simply by inserting line-endings every four
stresses. These sections
look
like blank verse, but are flatter than the
flattest blank verse I have ever read-for instance: "Branching trees and
ample gardens gavel the village streets a delightful charm and/ the
narrow old-fashioned brick walls added/ a dignity to the shading trees.
It was a fair/ resort for summer sojourners on their way/ to the Falls, the
main object of interest." This passage suggests that the guidebook of
today is the epic of tomorrow; and a more awing possibility, the tele–
phone book put into accentual verse, weighs upon one's spirit.
Books II and III are much better than this, of course: Book II is
decidedly what people call "a solid piece of work," but most of the magic
is gone. And one begins to be very doubtful about the organization:
3. New Directions. $3.00.
