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AARON ROSEN
in their vitality, and, paradoxically, saved from death." Furthermorc, to
see man this way "is to see him with God's eyes." The evidence for this
hymn rests not, as we might expect, on the characteristic organization of
the late poetry, but on two of Thomas' metaphors : one from a late poem
(the poem as "ark"), the other from a late letter (the poem as "water–
tight compartment"), and on the prevalence of dead, though not neces–
sarily more vivid people, in the late poetry and prose.
In Williams, we have, as his poetry and prose so often declare in
direct statement, a model of existential behavior. Indeed, Williams is
unique among his comrades: he spends his entire career "within the
sphere of immanence." Whenever Miller gives him the "means" test
-syntax, language and the rest-he finds in Williams the true "poetry
of humility": scrupulously bare, completely objective ("objects exist with–
in an anonymous space, the poem" ) . So effective a beggar of reality is
Williams that "seeing and hearing and by implication smelling are trans–
formed into extentions of the poet's tactile power." The drama in his
poetry is the last drama possible in the new world: it derives from his
sense of the incompatibility of the "'unfathomable ground'" of being,
"chaotic, senseless, holding within itself the possibility of all forms" and
"the formed thing, defined and limited." From this conflict he develops
a poetry of emergence. Perfected in his last years, this becomes a poetry
of "continual flowering."
One's discomfort with these essays is not very difficult to locate. It
begins with Miller's handling of individual poems, especially as they
illustrate the style of the new reality. For example, in his discussion of
"field theory" in Williams, he decides that the logical and grammatical
uncertainties of "The Locust Tree in Flower" are an attempt at a "simul–
taneous pattern of linguistic forces" bent on making the poem a "sub–
stantial . .. echo" of the real world. So Miller chooses a version of the
mimetic principle, the very thing field theory calls into question. Else–
where, the "red wheelbarrow" becomes a "small object" through which
"one feels the swirl of great events" because "the particular
is
the uni–
versal." But it is not "for this reason that so much depends on the wheel–
barrow." Rather it is because the opening cliche responds to nothing less
than the world before it shrinks in small spaces of deliberation to the red
wheelbarrow. And the poem must continually include this opening phrase
as it depends on what there is : the red wheelbarrow and beyond. Miller
does not really misread poems. He simply adjusts his comments so as to
disturb neither the poem nor the philosophical scheme, which mirrors the
discussion too exactly. The effect is to draw him away from important
problems of style which, as we see from his theory itself, are always
hovering close by.
