“This Rhetoric Is Real”: William Carlos Williams’s Recalibration of Language and Things

Consider the case of William Carlos Williams as an example of how the limitations of early modernism became painfully evident.

—CHARLES ALTIERI, The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After

There is no need to explain or compare. Make it, and it is a poem.

—WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, The Descent of Winter

These things / astonish me beyond words.

—WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, “Pastoral”

This is an essay about breaking limits. Reduced to essences, it entails a series of questions: Is there difference between an object and a thing? What is the relationship between image and the imagination? How far is the distance between imagining and realization? What is the net difference between what a poet wants and what he gets? These questions represent threads of rhetoric in the early writing of William Carlos Williams that are woven together in the phrase “no ideas but in things” (CP1 263–66).¹ In essence, Williams’s rhetoric reveals the desire to close the gap between experience and reality by means of a poetry of things. His early poetry and prose, particularly written around the time of Spring and All (1923), employ a unique rhetoric of overreaching in the effort to achieve contact, perhaps the supreme aesthetic value of his writing career devised by Williams himself. Other modernist values, such as rhetorical purity and linguistic opacity, suggest the influence of Ezra Pound and other prominent American and transatlantic writers. These values also contribute to Williams’s reaching after a new kind of apprehension of the real. Williams’s attraction to the singular, common, local, and perhaps above all the material object—wheelbarrow, wildcarrot leaf, wires, and stars—signifies reaching after a consummate mode of contact, one that bridges the gulf between individual experience and the real world. Thus, this essay traces the rhetoric of literary concretization that culminates in the overreaching of “no ideas but in things.”

On a first reading, Williams’s Spring and All seems an avant-garde, improvisational collection of interrelated poems and prose passages, the poems at times illustrating principles in the prose, the prose at times interpreting the poetry. Although it is sometimes rambling, disjointed, and elliptical, Williams seems to have established loosely interpretive relationships between the poetry and prose, and a sense of coherence appears to envelop the incoherence. Take an archetypal example of resistance to interpretation, poem XXII:²

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

(CP1 224)

What does the poet mean by the wheelbarrow, the rainwater, the chickens, and why the strange insistence that “so much depends / upon” these trivial things? What is the reader meant to infer in order to construct an interpretation? Hugh Kenner playfully suggests reading the poem aloud in different voices, but he concedes that this is unproductive because the poem evades rhetoric (57). Intriguingly, Kenner locates the poem’s situation outside of rhetoric: “But hammered on the typewriter into a thing made, and this without displacing a single word except typographically, the sixteen words exist in a different zone altogether, a zone remote from the world of sayers and sayings” (57). Williams’s poem is not intended to be discursive, but a thing made; wheelbarrow, rainwater, and chickens persist as objects represented by words, which shape the poem into a thing, to extend Kenner’s assertion. J. Hillis Miller’s influential assessment of the poem takes a different angle:

The wheelbarrow, in a famous poem, does not stand for anything or mean anything. It is an object in space dissociated from the objects around it, without reference beyond itself. It is what it is. The aim of the poem is to make it stand there for the reader in its separateness, as the words of the poem stand on the page.

(307)

While Kenner asserts that the language of the poem, extracted from rhetorical function, becomes a thing, Miller focuses on the nonreferentiality of the wheelbarrow itself, not the words “wheel” or “barrow.” This essay diverges from Miller’s assertion that Williams has escaped the dualism of...