Rigor of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Carlos Williams (review)

"Rigor of beauty," the quest of his poetry, Williams contends in the Preface to Paterson, is "locked in the mind" whenever the poet or reader is unable to respond to the world's immediacy in unmediated ways. Only when the process of discovery is unhampered by stultifying traditions and conventions that predetermine or condition responses—when, that is, the radical self rejects all that limits an original approach to particulars of place and time—does the "radiant gist" become evident.

The seventeen essays gathered by Copestake under this title deal with aspects of the writer's struggle to reformulate and reassert these ideas at various stages over a long career, not only in poetry but in fiction, drama, and experimental prose forms. As Copestake outlines in his introduction, he has clustered the essays in four groups: explorations of Williams's influence on younger poets, movements, and contemporary poetics; discussions of fiction and nonfiction; analyses of Williams's poetics and the American idiom; and assessments of his achievement in Paterson.

From these wide-ranging essays I would highlight six of particular note to modernist scholars. In "Williams 'As Usual,'" Lisa M. Steinman traces how "even a single Williams poem or style can authorize multiple different contemporary practices" (37). Starting with Philip Levine, she demonstrates that the working-class speech of his poetry and the metonymic imagery of his urban landscape descriptions draw on the same ultimately political concerns that engaged Williams. "Levine's Williams," as Steinman refers to this figure, is not, however, the one who influenced Lorine Niedecker's technical innovations nor her interest in everyday speech "based on the folk" (51), a double-sidedness, in Steinman's view, that found support in Williams's writing. "Williams's heirs," she cogently argues, are more usefully conceived of as "forming overlapping and dynamically-changing sets, rather than as forming the end-point of some bridge between the modernist Williams and the future" (36).

Stephen Cushman and Peter Schmidt in their essays consider two different traditional poetic forms in Western literature in order to define the nature of innovation Williams brings to "The Descent of Winter" (1928) and "These" (1938). For Cushman, "Descent" introduces a new genre in modern poetry, the "verse journal," whose antecedents he follows to the classical calendrical poem extending into the Renaissance and beyond to Whitman. Williams's declared "big, serious portrait of my time" is his unorthodox record of a year's separation from his wife and sons. Unlike his predecessors, Williams deliberately disrupts the calendar, omits dates, and in Cushman's view "uses his daily scheme to dramatize and enact the discontinuous nature of time or temporal consciousness" (71). Combining verse and prose entries, this fragmented portrait is an escape from order to, at times, an "epiphanic moment or series of moments" (70). Finally, Cushman discusses how the form has been used by Ammons, Lowell, and Sexton, whose verse journals are, like Williams's, "actually only tropes or images of that day-by-day recording" (80) one might expect.

Schmidt defines the traditional lyric mode—specifically the dejection or penseroso ode—to place "These" in this context. In doing so, he finds the poem "not only a superb poem in its own right but also a haunting meditation on how and why penseroso odes are written" (99). Looking closely at the way melancholy is depicted by Milton and later romantic and post-romantic poets, Schmidt point to Keats as the repressed presence in Williams's poem. He demonstrates how Keats's "Fall of Hyperion" and "These" may be read for "their buried psychological content, as disguised crises poems about their creators' loss of self-confidence" (114). In Williams's case the fear that he would be unable to write Paterson is for Schmidt at the core of the poet's dejection and the poem's bleak imagery, a poem Williams identifies as a "counterfoil" to his prior work.

In large measure Peter Halter's...