700
PARTISAN REVIEW
this to him: "What I miss, said your mother, is the poetry, the pure
poem of the first parts." She is right.
I have written (sometimes in
Partisan Review)
a good deal about
Dr. Williams' unusual virtues, so I will take it for granted that I don't
need to try to demonstrate, all over again, that he is one of the best
poets alive. He was the last of the good poets of his generation to become
properly appreciated; and some of his appreciators, in the blush of con–
version, rather overvalue him now. When one reads that no "living
American poet has written anything better and more ambitious" than
Paterson,
and that Dr. Williams is a poet who gives us "just about
everything," one feels that the writer has in some sense missed the whole
point of William Carlos Williams. He is a
very
good but
very
limited
poet, particularly in vertical range. He is a notably unreasoning, intui–
tive writer-is not, of course, an intellectual at all, in either the best or
the worst sense of the word; and he has further limited himself by
volunteering for and organizing a long dreary imaginary war in which
America and the Present are fighting against Europe and the Past. But
go a few hundred years back inside the most American American and it
is Europe: Dr. Williams is just as much Darkest Europe as any of us,
way down there in the middle of his past.
In his long one-sided war with Eliot Dr. Williams seems to me to
come off surprising badly-particularly so when we compare the whole
of
Paterson
with the
Four Quartets.
When we read the
Four Quartets
we are reading the long poem of a poet so temperamentally isolated
that he does not even put another character, another human being
treated at length, into the whole poem; and yet the poem (probably
the best since the
Duino Elegies)
impresses us not with its limitations
but with its range and elevation, with how much it knows not simply
about men but about Man-not simply about one city or one country
but about the West, that West of which America is no more than the
last part.
