"Rolls Rough": William Carlos Williams on the Thrills and Ills of Automobility

William Carlos Williams has consistently been coupled with automobiles both in the popular imagination and in his scholarly reception. In Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film Paterson, Adam Driver's character drives around Paterson, New Jersey, writing and reading poetry, not least that by Williams.¹ The wonderful Voices & Visions documentary on Williams, aired on PBS in 1988, begins with a driver on the open road who then stops to write poetry on his "William C. Williams, M.D." prescription pad. The coupling of driving with the long poem Paterson (1946–1958), which Jarmusch's film solidifies, is anachronistic, as little driving occurs in that poem, where we can read for example in Book Five (1958) that "you can't see anything/from a car window."² Rather than in Paterson, it is in Williams's earlier work, and especially that from the 1920s, where he comprehensively develops a technique of perspectival collage which harnesses the view from the driver's seat. Indeed, in the Voices & Visions documentary, Marjorie Perloff calls Paterson "a definite retreat" from Williams's experimental early work.³ In this early work Williams inhabits the automobile to both display and interrogate an aesthetics of mastery and dominance, especially of women and nature. After the financial crash of 1929—which was in part brought on by the expansion of personal credit after the market for cars became saturated during the 1920s—we can see Williams associating the automobile and Henry Ford with stagnation and a lack of mastery, leading to his retreat from automobility as a source of poetic inspiration.⁴

Scholars have made conflicting assessments of the arc of Williams's poetic career. The seminal study of Williams and machines is Cecilia Tichi's Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (1987), which foregrounds modernist aesthetics of speed, showing how Williams "worked to exploit both velocity per se and the imaginative grasp of the pressing moment."⁵ Tichi captures Williams's double vision, whereby he "successfully resists the aesthetic peril of contemporary life even as he exploits its tempo and rhythm" (251–52). Yet Tichi argues that "Williams never abandoned his poetics of kinetics and efficiency. He became, on the contrary, increasingly explicit about machines made of words in the decades following the 1920s" (287). By contrast, Perloff has argued that his later poems "turn their back on the very principles that made Williams a central figure in twentieth-century poetics," and suggests that Williams retreated from imagist principles due, in part, to the increasing dominance of mass-media images.⁶ Documenting this stylistic shift, Henry M. Sayre has commented that "the aesthetics of the machine" were "finally antagonistic to at least a part of his sensibility."⁷ For Sayre, Williams struggled to reconcile the demand for verbal economy with his more subjectivist, loquacious impulses, with the latter ultimately winning out over the former. Yet Williams's turn toward a greater vernacular inclusivity in his poetics after his seminal works from 1923—Spring and All and The Great American Novel—was not merely a question of style and media. While Williams's imagism was inseparable from his early experiences of driving, with the Great Depression he came to increasingly figure the automobile as stalled junk, and to seek a poetic vision beyond its ken. Take for instance his statement in The Embodiment of Knowledge (written from 1928–1930) that "as soon as we make it we must at once plan to escape—and escape. By this we understand the escape of man from domination by his own engines."⁸ He echoes this sentiment decades later in Pictures of Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)—which Tichi claims shows Williams's enduring concern for machines made of words, and which Perloff sees as an aesthetic retreat—asking, "how/shall we/escape this modern//age/and learn/to breathe again."⁹

While one could fill a small shelf with studies on cars in American literature, there are no books dedicated to automobiles and poetry.¹⁰ The most recent book-length engagement with cars and modernism is Enda Duffy's The Speed...