"Thinking/ Of the Freezing Poor": The Suburban Counter-Pastoral in William Carlos Williams's Early Poetry

"The Voice of April" may not be the worst poem written in the twentieth century, but a list of the one hundred worst would seem somehow incomplete without it. Written by Madison Cawein, a prolific early-twentieth century American poet known as the "Keats of Kentucky"—as Louis Untermeyer would put it in 1921, "the alliteration was tempting" (97)—"The Voice of April" appeared in the 1913 edition of The Lyric Year, a well-known anthology of the so-called best contemporary American verse. Here are the poem's opening stanzas:

April Calling, April Calling, April calling me!I hear the voice of April there in each old apple-tree;Bee-boom and wild perfume, and wood-brook melody—O hark, my heart, and hear, my heart, the April ecstasy!

Hark to the hills, the oldtime hills, that speak with sea and sky!Or talk in murmurs with God's winds who on their bosoms lie:Bird-call and waterfall and white clouds blowing by—O hark, my heart, O hear, my heart, the April's cosmic cry!

(42)

That such a poem appeared in an anthology of the best contemporary American verse suggests that a great many people once very much liked "The Voice of April"—or, at least, that a few people (namely, the editors of the anthology) thought that very many people should like it. What has happened between then and now to make the poem go from best to worst, of course, is the modernist revolution in poetry and sensibility. "The Voice of April" is bad because, formally, it "does" every one of the "few don'ts" Ezra Pound and F.S. Flint famously warned poets against in the March 1913 edition of Poetry—advice that has become next door to dogma. In terms of content, "The Voice of April" is bad because of its cheaply bought romanticism and its ridiculous personification, but also because it takes place in a pastoral no-place, seemingly unbothered by any crisis or doubt except perhaps that of winter. By 1913, however, to say nothing of today, these poetic affectations could seem not merely escapist but, even worse, absurd. Indeed, by 1921, Louis Untermeyer was describing Cawein's romanticized nature poetry as "unreal, prettified, remote" (97). "Every now and then, with an irritating frequency," Untermeyer continued, "Cawein tried to transport his audience to a literary Fairyland; but the reader is quickly wearied by the almost interminable procession of fays, gnomes, nixies, elves, dryads, sprites, pucks, fauns—be they ever so lyrical" (97).

For all its faults, though, we would not have had modern American poetry without "The Voice of April" and poems like it, if only because Pound and others articulated what not to do (and thus what to do) through poems like Cawein's. They learned not to ape Cawein's chopped iambs, for example, but they also learned what not to do (and, again, what to do) when working in a similar mode as Cawein—that is, the pastoral. Indeed, the pastoral did not disappear after 1913, as readers of Robert Frost or Amy Lowell or H.D. surely know, but instead it was, as with so much else, made new. And it was Pound's college-friend, fellow modernist, and, as I will argue, pastoral poet, William Carlos Williams, who perhaps more than any other poet from this period helped to make it new.

As many literary historians have noted, 1913, when Madison Cawein's "The Voice of April" appeared in The Lyric Year, is a definitive year both for the development of modern poetry and for Williams's development as a poet. That year, William Carlos Williams's first poem appeared in Poetry, but until then, Williams had been writing verse closer in spirit to Cawein's—with truly embarrassing titles like "Hymn to the Spirit of Fraternal Love" and "Ballad of Time and the Peasant"—than anything we would now associate with the poet. Nevertheless, 1913 also saw Williams asking, in one of his first definitively modern works, "The Wanderer," "How shall I be...