Place and Idiom in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry

This study of the poetry of William Carlos Williams, small though it is in volume, is many books: an homage by one American artist to another, an argument for an art that is local, a Juvenalian critique of American culture, a study of the art of poetry, and a manual, in some sense, for its practice that contains many invaluable precepts. On the book’s first page, Wendell Berry reveals his motive for writing his study as “a payment or at least an acknowledgment of a personal debt.” Berry explains that he has drawn “sustenance and reassurance” from William Carlos Williams’s work for fifty years. In effect Williams has been Berry’s mentor as he has cultivated his own art of stewardship and his attention to the local. Berry implies that without Williams’s example he would have found his project much more difficult, perhaps even impossible.

While there is nothing new to the claim that Williams is a poet of the local, Berry’s emphasis on the centrality of the local to Williams’s work enables him to provide a fresh perspective on the great challenges that Williams overcame to bring his project to fruition. We are reminded of the steady courage and imagination required “to commit oneself to write in and about an American place that is not New York City and therefore a ‘provincial place.’” While Bruce Bawer believes Williams failed to join the expatriates “because he didn’t have the nerve to leave home,” Berry considers such an opinion groundless. For Berry, Williams is heroic for hunkering down and dealing with “the mass of local detail,” while the other modernists of his generation were escaping to Europe and their itinerant lives. Though there were other writers tilling the provincial soil—Frost in New Hampshire, Sandburg in the Midwest, and Faulkner in Mississippi—Williams is the exemplar of such an artist for Berry. He is “the happy genius of [his] household,” his New Jersey ecosystem.

Beyond finding the means to negotiate that “mass of local detail,” the other daunting task for Williams was to find “a credible language with which to speak of the life around him.” Unlike Pound or Eliot, Williams sought to write in the “American idiom.” Here Berry gently corrects his mentor, noting that there were—before radio and television—“many American variants from a British English” and that a more accurate term would have been “local language.” In any case Berry admires Williams’s insistence that “language needed to be native to its place” and that there “also needed to be a distinct propriety between the language and its local subjects.” That capacity appears early in Williams: consider, for instance, the simple and powerful “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” collected in Sour Grapes (1921) or the vigorous vernacular of “The Drunk and the Sailor” from Journey to Love (1955). Williams was always listening to the language around him.

This doctorlike attention was also devoted to the physical particulars of his place, as well as to the dialects spoken there. This quality drew the younger Berry to Williams as a poet struggling to find the path for his poetic vocation: “By the record of his long attending to his place, and his long search for a right way to speak of it, I was learning . . . to pay attention to my own place.”

The risk of an homage is always that we may get an inaccurate portrait of the supposed subject, but that doesn’t happen in these pages. Instead the reader is privileged to be present at an intimate communion between the aged student and his mentor, a measured celebration that is also a taking stock of what is essential to the craft of poetry. The portrait of Williams is credible.

As Berry presents him, this is a poet who cultivated the craft of attention as assiduously as the most driven practitioner of Zen—an attention, in this case, devoted to Rutherford and its environs and, beyond that, to the...