William Carlos Williams: Doctor, Poet, Painter

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism and his innovative poetry (both its form and content) reflected many art movements associated with modernism. His verse departed from the influences of ‘the European academies’ and, instead, experimented with new techniques that did away with metaphor and introduced a new kind of meter and lineation. Most importantly, his poetry was centered not on lofty subjects but on the everyday lives of common people. Williams’ personal journey to this end is as fascinating as his verse and the inspiration for his experimentations with poetry reflects the changes and developments in the visual arts themselves.

 

From Keats to Picasso: A Journey Into Art

undying accents
repeated till
the ear and the eye lie
down together in the same bed.

(William Carlos Williams, “Song”, 1962)

Written at the end of his life, these lines offer a witty self-retrospective on Williams’s continued engagement with the visual arts. His choice of a bible allusion here suggests the joining of two (seemingly) incompatible entities: the visual and the verbal arts and the boundaries that divide them. These lines are also the poet’s final signature to an entire body of work in which the visual arts play a centre role, much of the poetry illustrating Williams’ conviction that ‘to bypass the eye, you bypass the mind’. It’s not surprising that Williams’ focuses on the sense of sight in his verse, as his first artistic efforts were not in wiring but in painting. As he states in his preface to Selected Essays, ‘I almost became a painter, as had my mother been before me, and had it not been that it was easier to transport a manuscript than a wet canvas, the balance might have been titled the other way.’ Of course, Williams was not the only poet/painter of his generation, nor was he alone in integrating elements belonging to the visual arts into his poetry. 1 Yet his inter-art experiments were far more diverse and had more far-reaching consequences than those of his contemporaries, and the poems which grew from these ventures into the visual arts were to have a profound impact on the development of American literature. 2

New Beginnings

Williams’ final perception of the ‘undying accents’ in his poetry as an equal fusion of the visual and verbal were the product of a long poetic journey, one that reflects the unfolding history of the visual arts in the first half of the 20th century. But his first poems (published in Poems ,1909, and The Tempers, 1913, do not carry any suggestion of the impact that the visual arts would soon have on his poetry. These early poem, in fact, were quite the opposite of the sharply-focussed and clean-edged verse for which Williams is best known. His 1909 poem, ’First Praise’ is a good example of how little these poems carry Williams’ later conviction that poetic language must have a direct and unadorned relationship with its object:

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.

Lady of rivers strewn with stones,
Only thou art my Lady
Where thousand the freshets are crowded like peasant to a fair
Clear-skinned, wild from seclusion,
They jostle white-armed down the tent-bordered thoroughfare
Praising my Lady. (Collected Poems I).

These painfully-romantic lines were written as an occasional poem recalling a visit to Williams’ girlfriend Flossie and her family at their summer home in Cooks Falls, New York. Aside from its ‘over the top’ sentiments in view of the occasion, the poem also does not yet suggest Williams later drive toward minimalism, which was soon to do away with what he called ‘stock responses, overripe images and the decayed rhythms of the language. Williams himself looked back on poems like this one with dismay at their ‘falseness’ and the fact that ‘I knew nothing of language except what I’d heard in Keats or the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood’. (Williams’ dismay calls to mind William Faulkner’s comment that ‘one’s earlier writings gives one the creeps’). Yet by the time Williams had written ‘The Arrival (1915), her had not only rejected the language of his earlier proms but presented even the ‘objects of his devotion’ as from a perspective unclouded by romantic idealism:

And yet one arrives somehow,
finds himself loosening the hooks of
her dress
in a strange bedroom

Feels the autumn
dropping its silk and linen leaves
about her ankles.

The tawdry veined body emerges
twisted upon itself
like a winter wind.

The difference between these two poems suggests that a remarkable development had taken place in Williams’ approach to his verse. Indeed, ‘First Praise’, with its focus on idealised beauty, prevents any concrete perception of the lady herself (remember Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ in an earlier chapter?). But in ‘The Arrival’, a more realistic image of beauty emerges – one which lies outside the tradition of the traditional love lyric and other poetic norms. But more than this … we also find here a huge deviation from the conventional norm of poetic subject matter: a ‘tawdry, veined body, is quite unlike the kind of beauty that inspires the praise of a ‘thousand freshets’.
Although this later poem is still far removed from the form it was to take, its engagement with its object is still much more direct that the distancing panegyric of ‘First Praise’. Williams’ drive toward minimalism eventually produced poems like ‘This is just to say’, a husband’s loving apology to his wife:

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

So what happened in the intervening years? The Armoury Show of 1913 happened.

The Armory Show (officially the ‘Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Regiment Armory on East 25th Street’) was launched by the avant-garde Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It exhibited about 1300 works, including examples of Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Symbolism and Post-Impressionism, and modernist 20th century works by, for example, Picasso, Georges Braque, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Leger, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Marcel Duchamp, the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Archipenko. This modernist art embraced a number of radical art movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism. and others and their common goal was to move away from realism and representationalism towards abstract art. This was to prove highly challenging for many of the American public, who were used to realism and confused by abstraction.

Nude and cartoon here

(For a short BBC video on the Armory Show and its impact, see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJWLoXziXC4. )

One member of the American public who was not distressed by the new abstract art was William Carlos Williams, who was beginning to find his own poetic voice during this period, which had already witnessed considerable innovation and cross-fertilisation among the arts. But the single most important event that was to have far-reaching consequences for Williams was the Armory Show. This exhibition, which was, according to John Hartz, ‘the most significant, improbable and iconoclastic art exhibit ever presented in America’, was organised by a group of artists, ‘The Association of American Painters and Sculptors’, who were seeking to promote new developments in American art and with the Armory Show they intended to mark, as Walt Kuhn writes, ‘a starting point of the new spirit in art …and make the big wheel turn over in both hemispheres.4. This ‘new spirit in art’ was not lost on Williams, who immediately understood its implication for his own art. As he expelins in a 1963 essay:

“In Paris, painters from Cezanne to Pissarro had been painting their revolutionary canvases for fifty or more years, but it was not until I clapped my eyes on Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase that I burst out laughing from the relief it brought me! I felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from my spirit for which I was infinitely grateful.” 5

The ‘enormous weight’ was the encumbrance of traditional poetics and the ‘dominance of the academies. What was most attractive about the new forms which he saw at the Amory Show was that they suggested a more direct means of recording experience. For Williams, this meant the discarding of metaphor – or, in. his own words, ‘all the pretty glass balls’ – in favour of a direct engagement with the object and ‘one clear moment of perception’.
Williams underlines the importance of this decision, when he writes:

‘The coining of similes is a pastime of very low order …much more keen is that power which discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all other things’. (Kora in Hell, 105). 6

This stress on paying attention to separate elements, or ‘particles’ of objects rather than on their similarity to other objects (ie, metaphor), can be seen in his poem ‘To a Solitary Disciple’ (1916). Here, he begins by directing the writer (and reader) to notice how the moon is ‘tilted above/the point of the steeple/than that its color is shell-pink …’ and to ‘…observe that it is early morning’ rather than that ‘the sky is smooth as a turquoise.’ Most significantly, the rest of the poe is informed by the important innovations that Williams discovered at the Armory Show, specifically those of cubism:

Rather grasp
How the dark
converging lines
of the steeple
meet at the pinnacle –
Perceive how its little ornament
tries to stop them –

See how it fails!
see how the converging lines
of the hexagonal spire
Escape upward –
receding, dividing!
sepals
that guard and contain
the flower!

(Collected Poems, 104)

This poem bears witness to the fact that in a very short time following the publication of ‘The Arrival’, Williams was concentrating on a specifically pictorial approach to poetic form. The poem’s careful attention to the geometrical nature of the object, such as references to the ‘division’ of the ‘converging lines of the hexagonal spire’ – are a direct borrowing from both cubism and futurism. It is clear that, following the Armory Show, Williams’ verst began to give evidence of an entirely new way of looking at objects. As Peter Halter points out, ‘To see, Williams tries to demonstrate, is to perceive and feel the visual dynamics inherent in all forms and colours, and to assess the dynamic patterns that result from their interaction …an interaction which imitates the movement that flows through any work of art. 7 Furthermore, Williams does not regard his attempt at ‘seeing’ as a solitary venture: the reader, who is repeatedly asked to ‘grasp’, to ‘perceive’ and to ‘see’ the attract, becomes as much the viewer of an object as the reader of a poem.

Williams poetry went on to address numerous modernist art movements during this period, and one need only notice the dates of publication of the poems to comprehend the intensely exploratory nature of his ekphrastic (or interact) poetry. These poems (most of which were published in Spring and All, 1922) truly reflect the energy and diversity within the world of the visual arts during the first years of the 20th century. It is important to note that various movements in the visual arts (and literary arts) did not (and do not) develop in isolation, and the modernist period witnessed a substantial overlap between artistic techniques and ideologies. It is not surprising that these are reflected in Williams ekphrastic use of paintings and styles. As Paul Mariani points out, ‘art, like baseball and medicine, was for Williams very much a team effort.’ 9 That Williams saw the verbal arts as an integral part of the art ‘team’ is evident throughout his verse. These are the innovations that helped ‘turn the big wheel in both hemispheres’, both in art and in literature.