There is no confusion – only difficulties - Spring and All, where WCW cuts loose

I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams much like I have been reading Conrad Aiken – why not shovel it all in, up to a point.  I wrote an uncomprehending post about his second book, The Tempers (1913), in which I made two points, first, this stuff hardly sounded like Williams and second, this poet sure likes leaves.

Since then I read Al Que Quiere! (1917) and Sour Grapes (1921) – those are good titles – but did not write about them.  More Williams flavor, and lots more leaves.  I guess a poet as Whitman-like as Williams has no choice.

Now I have hit the pure stuff, the crazy hybrid Spring and All (1923):

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
 One by one objects are defined –
It quickens : clarity, outline of leaf

That’s an almost baldly programmatic bit of Poem I, “By the road to the contagious hospital.”  I had to do a head-to-head comparison to Sour Grapes to see the difference.  Many of the earlier poems are fine as they are:

Complete Destruction

It was an icy day.
We buried the cat,
then took her box
and set match to it.

in the back yard.
Those fleas that escaped
earth and fire
died by the cold.

But others must have still seemed too poetical to Williams.  Sour Grapes opens with “The Late Singer”:

Here it is spring again
and I still a young man!
I am late at my singing.

Then there is a sparrow, grass, the moon, and guess what leaves (“brown and yellow moth-flowers”).  To most of is this sounds pretty plain, but Williams thinks it’s missing something.

The 2011 New Directions reissue of Spring and All has a terrific introduction by C. D. Wright.  Here’s how she describes the change:

The year before, 1922, was high tide in poetry: The Duino Elegies, Trilce, and The Waste Land.  The latter was a head blow to William Carlos Williams…  Then came The Waste Land, all tricked out with Sanscrit and Latin ornaments.  The impact was as useful as it was painful.  Whap.  Now he knew what he was opposing…  (p. viii)

Spring and All is full of nonsense, upside-down chapter titles, misspellings, and general goofiness.  The poems are embedded in a prose manifesto that is written “con brio,” to borrow the title of one of his earliest poems.  It is energetic:

    If I could say what was in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity ; the formality of its boredom ; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill ! kill ! let there be fresh meat…  (Chapter 19, p. 5, ellipses in original)

But the manifesto is at heart not negative or prescriptive but personal, a portrait of the creative self.

  Poetry is something quite different. Poetry has to do with the crystallization of the imagination – the perfection of new forms as additions to nature – Prose may follow to enlighten but poetry –  (p. 78)

The, or a, joke being that Spring and All is mostly prose.  “There is no confusion – only difficulties.”  Maybe.

He who has kissed
a leaf

need look no further –
I ascend

through
a canopy of leaves

and at the same time
I descend

for I do nothing
unusual –   (from XXIV)

No, even for 1923, that’s not true.

Have we not the deed? - youthful William Carlos Williams rides to fight, and describes leaves

William Carlos Williams, The Tempers, 1913.  WCW’s second book, I think, after the 1909 Poems.  I read The Tempers in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1986, and it only includes three poems from 1909, so I guess someone thought the rest were not worth collecting.  Two of those included are sonnets!  I hadn’t read anything so regular from Williams before:

from The Uses of Poetry

I’ve fond anticipation of a day
O’erfilled with pure diversion presently,
For I must read a lady poesy
The while we glide by many a leafy bay… 

There comes a point where jittery young poets say, “enough of this” especially when they are friends with Ezra Pound and H.D. and that crowd.  The Tempers is where Williams begins to make it new, whatever “it” and “new” might mean.

from To Wish Myself Courage

But when the spring of it is worn like the old moon
And the eaten leaves are lace upon the cold earth –
Then I will rise up in my great desire –
Long at the birth – and sing me the youth-song!

The poet says he will sing this “long song” only “[w]hen the stress of youth is put away from me,” but it sounds to me that he is singing the youth-song in The Tempers, an exuberant little book.  Love and life. 

from Con Brio

Miserly, is the best description of that poor fool
Who holds Lancelot to have been a morose fellow,
Dolefully brooding over the events which had naturally to follow
The high time of his deed with Guinevere.
…
How can we have less?  Have we not the deed?
Lancelot thought little, spent his gold and rode to fight
Mounted, if God was willing, on a good steed.

Williams does not sound quite like himself to me.  It is not that I know WCW so well, oh no, but that what I do know has such a strong voice.  Maybe it is just odd to see Williams messing around with Lancelot, even to invert the example.  Later he will be confident enough not to feel the need to take a jab at the pre-Raphaelite poets or the 1890s poets or whoever he has in mind.

from First Praise

Lady of dusk-wood fastnesses,
        Thou art my Lady.
I have known the crisp, splintering leaf-tread with thee on before,
White, slender through green saplings;
I have lain by thee on the brown forest floor
        Beside thee, my Lady.

Please note that I have included two separate, excellent descriptions of fallen leaves.  Other especially vivid bits:  the coroner’s “merry little children” who “laugh because they prosper,” for “[k]ind heaven fills their little paunches” ( in “Hic Jacet”), or the “crimson salamander” in the flames of “The Ordeal,” or the swirling leaves – yes, more leaves – that “follow me / Talking of the great rain.”

I was pleased to see that Williams included four translations of early modern Spanish Romanceros.

Poplars of the meadow,
Fountains of Madrid,
Now I am absent from you,
All are slandering me.

That sort of thing.  Of course, this is Pound’s influence – Pound in fact gave Williams the books with the Spanish poems – so maybe I will save the topic for tomorrow.

Nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter - Lawrence's Hawthorne - My father hated books

How about one more rummage through D. H. Lawrence’s little book.

A couple of years ago I puzzled over a strange book by William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (1925), an obscurely written historical counterpart to D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature (1923).  Although Williams and Lawrence only directly overlap with chapters on Franklin and Poe, and despite Horace Gregory insisting that Williams’ book does not resemble Lawrence’s (p. xiv), I now see that the Williams book is highly derivative of Lawrence.

WCW briefly turns to Hawthorne, to attack him,  in his Poe chapter, for his realism (“his willing closeness to the life of his locality in its vague humors; his lifelike copying of the New England melancholy,” 228) and his traditionalism (“by doing what everyone else in France, England, Germany was doing for his own milieu, is no more than copying their method with another setting,” 229), meaning that Williams chooses to badly misread Hawthorne (and to give the highly original Poe too much credit for originality).  His misreading was, and perhaps still is, a common one, taking The Scarlet Letter as a treatise on Puritan thought and The Blithedale Romance as an investigation of the Brook Farm utopia and so on – heaven knows what the realist crowd thinks is going on in The Marble Faun – when he is really – I will turn to Lawrence:

Nathaniel Hawthorne writes romance.

And what’s romance?  Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it’s always daisy-time.  As You Like It and Forest Lovers, etc.  Morte D’Arthur.
Hawthorne obviously isn’t that kind of romanticist: though nobody has muddy boots in The Scarlet Letter, either.  (Ch. 7, 88)

What on earth is Forest Lovers?  A bestselling 1898 historical novel by Maurice Hewlett, a writer with a style distinctive enough to earn him a parody in Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland, a great honor.

Romance, Hawthorne, Morte D’Arthur – this sounds familiar for some reason.  Perhaps because Lawrence stole it from a post I wrote three years ago!  Reading Studies in American Literature has been a disheartening experience.

Lawrence takes The Scarlet Letter as a parable of sin, primal Adam and Eve stuff.  “Hester Prynne was a devil” (100), but the men are worse, and the elf child Pearl will likely be worse than the men.

And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe.

And then from hour to hour we rot and rot.  (103)

“[O]ne of the greatest allegories in all of literature” (106), Lawrence judges.  That sounds about right.

Listen to this bit.  It is in the Scarlet Letter chapter.  It is a surprising digression. What is it doing here?:

My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing.

My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.  Her sons must have something higher than that.

She won.  But she died first.  (92)

I almost forgot to mention that Jessica at so very very recently read a later (earlier?) version of Lawrence’s book, which inspired me to read it for myself.

Spanish poetry and the translations thereof in The Hudson Review

The warm and engaging hosting service of Wuthering Expectations took an unexpected but well-deserved personal day yesterday.  Some pool time in the afternoon, a mani-pedi, a hot stone massage, and then some solid TV watching, catching up with the first season of Treme.  Now, relaxed, energized, Blogger has returned to work refreshed  and alert.

A few comments from yesterday seem to have been temporarily misplaced.  I will be recreate them from my email soon if they do not turn up on their own.  There were some good ‘uns.  Yesterday’s post about Bolaño, Aira, and Argentine literature was pretty good, too.  Actually, that sounds a mite strong.  Let me look back for a minute – yesterday’s post was on a highly interesting subject, and might be worth reading for that reason.

I had planned to spend a few minutes writing about the poetry in the Spanish Issue of The Hudson Review, a magazine that has become, for better or worse, my primary source of contemporary poetry.  For better, I think; I gave Poetry magazine an honest effort a few years ago, but abandoned them just before being bored almost to death, although I do owe them my introduction to Kay Ryan.  My point, my point – the poetry in The Hudson Review is typically excellent, but not so typically by the all-star cast of the Spanish Issue:  Luis de Góngora, Ruben Darío, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Silvino Ocampo.

The Neruda poem, “Ode to my Socks,” is a curious one.  Its translator is William Carlos Williams, who is careful to turn Neruda into WCW, mostly with the line breaks:

I stretched out
my feet
and pulled over them
the
beautiful
socks
and
then my shoes.

Once properly shod, Williams proceeds to eat Neruda’s plums because they are so sweet and so cold and chop down his house because the beams are so inviting.

The lead feature is given to fragments of a 16th century masterpiece, Soledades (The Solitudes) of Luis de Góngora, expertly translated by Edith Grossman, more fruit of her turn to the Spanish Golden Age.  I read the poem several years ago in a different, vaguely remembered translation; even vaguer is a memory of reading part of it in Spanish, which must be wrong.  The long poem, an imitatio of Virgil’s Georgics, is enormously complex, not merely in its syntax so much as its extraordinary range of classical allusions and intricate and obscure metaphors.  Here a traveler has stumbled upon the preparations for a rustic wedding:

        You, oh singular bird,
arrogant splendor – for it is not comely –
        of the remote Occident:
hang the wrinkled nacre of your forehead
down over the kinked sapphire of your neck,
for Hymeneus wants you on his tables.

The exotic, ugly bird now on its way to the wedding (“Hymeneus”) feast is the American turkey.  The nacreous forehead foreshadows the piscatorial second book of the poem, which is about fishermen.   Góngora  demands patience and concentration:

A rebellious nymph, now a humble reed,
obscures  the margins of a small lagoon,
        where a kingbird inspects
even the smallest flake of its flying snow.

The snow is the foamy surf; the nymph is Syrinx; etc., etc.  How wonderful that Góngora’s poem will be available again, soon,  from Penguin Classics.  Who on earth is the audience?

But I suppose I could ask that about many of my favorite parts of The Hudson Review – one of my all-time favorites was an essay about the great pleasures of reading Clarissa!  Any reader widely curious about literature will find a lot to enjoy.

There is nothing for a man but genius or despair. - not so sure about that, Bill

There is nothing for a man but genius or despair.  We cannot answer in the smart language, certainly it would be a bastardization of our own talents to waste time to learn the language they use.  I would rather sneak off and die like a sick dog then be a well known literary person in America – and no doubt I’ll do it in the end. (215)

Here we have well known literary person William Carlos Williams, or his narrator double, whining about the place of the poet in American life.  It’s from his prose poem In the American Grain (1925), a Modernist period piece that attempts to define the meaning of America through the writings of its Great Men.  Young America needs literature!  This particular passage, for example, is pulled from a four page essay about, of all people, Sam Houston, first President of the Republic of Texas.  Twenty years later, WCW narrowed his scope and spent a decade trying to define the meaning of Paterson, New Jersey, with more success.


Herman Melville was a genius; Herman Melville despaired.  Produce! Produce! exhorted dyed-through Calvinist Thomas Carlyle.  Calvinist Herman Melville produced, and did he ever.  Ten volumes (nine novels and a book of stories) in ten years, roughly, and he poured everything he had into them.  I read Moby-Dick (1851) and am amazed he ever needed to write anything else – what’s not in that book?  But Melville’s capacity exceeds mine.  Bartleby is not there, nor Billy Budd, nor had Melville yet been to the Holy Land.

Melville had finished his last novel, The Confidence-Man (1857), before he left for Europe and Palestine.  Did he know it was his last novel?  Regardless, it was going to be poetry from here on out, although it took Melville a little longer to master the form.  An early volume of poems could not find a publisher.  Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War appeared in 1866.  The massive Clarel was next, in 1876, its publication funded by Melville’s uncle, 350 copies or so, of which 220 were pulped.  Melville was at this point working as a customs inspector.  His retirement led to two more tiny books, chapbooks, really, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon, etc. (1891), both published by the author in editions of twenty-five (25!).  Melville’s death prevented similar private publication of a third book of poems and, probably, Billy Budd.

There is nothing for a man but genius or despair.  So Melville chose genius.  Perhaps the reader should despair, confronted with 220 copies of Clarel fed into the pulper, or with that tiny number, twenty-five.  But what was the correct number?  How many readers should Melville’s poetry have?  That Melville knew he had twenty-five real readers, and acted accordingly - what integrity.  How many readers should the massive, tangled Clarel have?

Levi Stahl worries that he should be one of those readers.  His skepticism is understandable.  I did not think Clarel really got moving until about 200 pages in, as Melville builds to the terrifying night by the Dead Sea, the book’s first great imagistic climax.  That’s a lot of pages, although I think it just means that I did not understand how to read the poem until then.  At the end of the next section, Melville pushes the characters into another heightened state, of a completely different character (it involves the contemplation of a palm tree, which sounds ridiculous, but is not), and then does it again at the stark end.  The end is amazing.  Like bibliographing nicole, given a long enough life, I’m reading Clarel again.  Levi – yes, you should be one of Clarel’s readers.

Almost every person who bothers to wander by Wuthering Expectations spends plenty of time with difficult books, and those who don’t are doing other difficult things.  What argument do I have for this difficult book over that other one?  None.  None at all.  I wish Herman Melville, and Thomas Carlyle, and William Carlos Williams, a few good readers.  I hope I’m one of them.

Speaking of good readers:  First, many thanks to bibliographing for doing the hard work on Clarel.  We’ll do more of these, I bet.  Second, Nonsuch Frances says the prose of In the American Grain is “dazzlingly gorgeous” and calls the book a “must-read,” a judgment that surely requires a lot of qualifiers.  I call it a must-read for people who are a) particularly interested in Modernist poets and their ideas about America and b) have a high tolerance for conventional ideas swathed in gauzy nonsense.  Please note the way Williams has to dodge Whitman and Hawthorne, and lament that Williams wrote the book just a little bit before the Great Melville Revival.

Next week: Books Many People Should Read.