"To All Gentleness”: Revisiting My Old Friend, WCW

      sure not all Those melodies sung into the world’s ear Are useless: sure a poet is a sage; A humanist, Physician to all men.

—JOHN KEATS, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (Summer, 1819)

“unless a man uses his authority for others, to make himself a servant in some sense for humanity, to man, to those about him who need him—he turns out to be a selfish bastard.”

—WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, Letter to Robert McAlmon (February 23, 1944)

My original and expressed intention in writing a new Preface for my biography of Williams, To All Gentleness, twenty-five years after its original publication, was to bring William Carlos Williams forward into the twenty-first century for a new generation of readers.

Lately I’ve been thinking this sounds somewhat pretentious.

Who am I to assume such a mission? Surely this native giant, “WCW,” requires no such resurrection: tough yet tender “poet of Jersey,” house-calling pediatrician, cultural icon as well as iconoclast, beloved patron saint of the Beatniks, resolutely homegrown American, his feet firmly planted on the ground where he was born, lived and died; champion of common speech as the raw material for verse. Surely his survival is safely ensured in the dozens of books by this determined poet who declared (after three strokes, a heart attack and a nervous breakdown) that “No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected” (CP2 245).

In the intervening years since To All Gentleness was published with a wonderful Preface by William Eric Williams, I have gone on to write many other books of biography, history, and fiction, extending my intellectual reach far afield from its origins in modern American poetry. In attempting to resurrect my old thoughts about Williams, as well as create new ones, these additional titles of all my other books on other subjects rose up like a dense wall further distancing and separating me from him. In a nervous, necessary effort to reconnect—in order to write about him with authority again, after such a long intervening silence—I decided there was only one course of action: to re-read my way through Williams’s entire corpus of poetry in chronological order, beginning with the 1909 pamphlet of juvenilia he had printed himself and sold at the corner stationery store in Rutherford, and ending with the final fragmentary 1961 notes for a projected Paterson Book VI found among his papers after his death in March 1963.

To my surprise and relief, my apprehensive exercise in literary reacquaintance turned out to be the pleasurable awakening of a dormant friendship starting with the earliest section of the two-volume Collected Poems. Pages flew by and synapses sparked in my brain as I smiled and nodded familiarly at WCW’s early Romantic efforts, his archaic diction reflecting his initial infatuation with John Keats, as when “I must read a lady poesy / The while we glide by many a leafy bay, // Hid deep in rushes, where at random play / The glossy black winged May-flies [ . . . ]. ” (CP1 21). This Keatsian affinity had roots much deeper than narrative poetic style and meter; for the young Keats had studied hard to enter the medical profession in early nineteenth-century London, only to abandon that metier for what turned out to be a penniless and tragically truncated life consecrated to literature.

William Carlos Williams’s stylistic shift into the characteristically choppy, breath-driven line that he finally decided to call—for lack of a better name—the “variable foot”[—]arrived about the time he turned thirty. Soon thereafter came the pediatrician’s affectionate, snapshot observations of children, like the little girl who “hides herself / in the full sunlight / her cordy legs writhing / beneath the little flowered dress” (CP1 94); and the empathy with signs and symbols everywhere in nature as motivation for the immediately-transcribed reflections of his mercurial moods, as when the poet observes how, among “[t]he half-stripped trees [ . . . ] the leaves flutter drily / and refuse to let go” (CP1 151), or he senses, driving his car to...