Cubism in Words: Broken Pieces in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

Amidst the great variety within his poetry, William Carlos Williams returns repeatedly to the fractured, fragmented, and discontinuous aspects of the modern world. He faces in his art the loss of coherence in the twentieth century, the absence of a centering and central sense of meaning. His response to the challenge is to embrace the broken pieces, unfalsified by sentimentality and naïve nostalgia for the illusion of artificial wholeness, to seek new meaning and consolation in a creative refiguring of the real. Since the fragmentary tends toward the obscure, which when pushed to the extreme becomes the absurd or incoherent, Williams’s poetic efforts are inherently difficult. This essay examines some of the poetic ideas in the prose of Williams’s early Kora in Hell, briefly considers the relationship between Williams’s poetry and the Cubist movement in the visual arts, sketches several examples of Cubist patterns in Williams’s poetry, and provides close readings of two poems— “Between Walls” and “The Cod Head”—that capture in especially powerful ways the possibilities of Cubism in words.

Early in the prologue to the 1920 improvisational work Kora in Hell, Williams himself points to one of the distinguishing features of his artistic approach, his poetic sense of difference:

Although it is a quality of the imagination that it seeks to place together those things which have a common relationship, yet the coining of similes is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all other things which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question.

(I 18)

With soft, mocking wit, Williams presents himself as the keen poet of difference instead of sameness, one who works to find and emphasize the “inimitable particles of dissimilarity [. . .] which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question.” He contributes with these words to the upending of a long-dominant sensibility in poetics and the history of ideas, one that goes back at least to Plato’s preference for Parmenides’s idea of being over Heraclitus’s conception of change. It is in the Timaeus that Plato conceives of the great circle of “The Same” and the circle of “The Different,” each rotating in opposite directions, as underpinning both the structure of reality and the possibility of understanding the cosmos, both metaphysics and epistemology (Plato 49). In Plato’s conception, the circle of the same dominates, serving always and everywhere as the necessary and primary referent. In Kora, Williams announces a reversal of this priority, seeking to see difference as more essential in things and therefore poetry. The “inimitable particles of dissimilarity” point to Aristotle’s idea of the specific difference—that characteristic of a thing which makes it what it is and distinct from everything else. Williams’s sensibility is a modern poetic version of the ancient logical idea of the specific difference.

A letter quoted in the prologue to Kora captures Wallace Stevens’s critique of Williams’s poetic interest in difference, negatively construed as endless perspectival variation:

What strikes me most about the poems themselves is their casual character [speaking about the poetry of Williams’s Al Que Quiere from 1917] . . . . Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. [. . .]

. . . My idea is that in order to carry a thing to the extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it; . . . Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility.

(I 15)

Williams, however, will have none of it, finding central importance in “the fragmentary argument” of his improvisations in Kora and his variety in Al Que Quiere (I 16). What Stevens (with some stuffiness) calls “miscellany,” Williams sees as the shards of the real. In Williams’s mind it is “by...