The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry (review)

The ethics referred to in the title of Ian Copestake's provocative study can be reduced to a single principle: tell the truth. What makes this study provocative is Copestake's attempt to explore the ground of Williams's ethics in two articles of faith: first, faith in the ability of poetry to embody the truth in language; second, faith in the poet's responsibility for the risks entailed in that embodiment. Faith or belief receive more attention from Copestake than ethics, as he indicates in the titles of his opening and concluding chapters: "The Basis of Williams's Faith in Art" (which echoes the title of an essay by Williams) and "The Struggle to Believe: Williams's Poetry of Service, Work, and Self." Copestake does not shrink from the religious associations of faith and belief. In fact, he attempts to tie them directly to Williams's early upbringing in the Unitarian church, which Copestake identifies as the source of Williams's understanding of his poetic vocation. Whatever one makes of this conclusion, it is hard to deny the premise that poetry for Williams was much more than an aesthetic enterprise.

As an aesthetic principle, the embodiment of truth in language can be recognized as the modernist commitment to the medium of art. Truth in this sense means being true to one's materials, recognizing their value in themselves. This is the "freedom of truth from usage" that Williams celebrated in James Joyce, as Copestake notes (79). However, while Williams rejects "usage" in the sense of past uses of language, he insists that language thus liberated is to be put to use in serving present needs. This is what Copestake means by "Williams's Poetry of Service," where the terms "serviceability" or "utility," which Copestake employs elsewhere, would express the meaning more clearly. How language is to be put to use in contemporary society is "a moral question at base," as Williams remarked of another modernist exemplar, Gertrude Stein (87). That is, it is a question of ethics, not aesthetics alone. And as a user of language in this wider context, the poet assumes ethical responsibility. "Poetry makes nothing happen," in Auden's famous declaration, but things do happen when language is used for good or ill, and that distinction presents people (including poets) with an ethical choice.¹ People can use poetry to make something happen.

Although the direction of Williams's ethics leads from poetry into the world, Copestake's study moves in the opposite direction, starting with three chapters focused on contexts that helped to shape Williams's poetry (Unitarianism, Pre-Raphaelite "modernizing," and Emersonian pragmatism), and then concluding with two chapters focused on the long poem Paterson. Each of the two Paterson chapters is devoted to one of the two articles of faith mentioned above—the first to faith in language, the second to the poet's faith in himself. In his account of the latter, Copestake finds William's doubt frequently threatening to overwhelm faith, a dramatic situation that increases the poem's power. However, for Copestake the drama does not end in a loss of ego or defeat of self, as in previous influential readings by J. Hillis Miller or Joseph N. Riddel. The self persists through "the struggle to believe," though the form of the self that is ultimately forged in that struggle is not entirely clear in Copestake's account. A logical corollary of faith in poetry as "redeeming language" (Williams's phrase) would be to cast the poet "as a redeemer" (125), an assignment that Copestake, at times, seems willing to risk. At other times, however, Copestake criticizes such terms as "bordering on the presumptuous" and he attempts to limit the presumption to "the internal drama of the poem" (101). Copestake asserts: "That such claims can have validity outside the realm of a poet's creation seems to be denied by Williams's careful contextualization" (101). This, of course, undercuts Copestake's own claims for the...