''Paterson'' is an epic poem by American poet

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...

published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the Modernism, modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important ...

's novel '' Ulysses''. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on ''Paterson,'' honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While '' The Cantos'' of

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

and '' The Bridge'' by

Hart Crane Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Provoked and inspired by T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, '' The Brid ...

could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city." While Williams might or might not have said so himself, commentators such as Christoper Beach and Margaret Lloyd have called ''Paterson'' his response to T.S. Eliot's ''

The Waste Land ''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of Modernist poetry in English, modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the ...

'' and Pound's ''Cantos''. The long gestation time of ''Paterson'' before its first book was published was due in large part to Williams's honing of prosody outside of conventional

meter The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its pref ...

and his development of an overall structure that would stand on a par with Eliot and Pound yet remain endemically American, free from past influences and older forms. The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of ''Paterson'' were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958, and the entire work collected under one cover in 1963. A revised edition was released in 1992. This corrected a number of printing and other textual errors in the original, especially discrepancies between prose citations in their original sources and how they appeared in Williams's poem. ''Paterson'' is set in

Paterson, New Jersey Paterson ( ) is the largest city in and the county seat of Passaic County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey.Paterson Falls, which powered the town's industry, became a central image and source of energy for the poem.

Background

Initial efforts

In 1926, influenced by his reading of the novel '' Ulysses'' by

, William Carlos Williams wrote an 85-line poem entitled "Paterson"; this poem subsequently won the

Dial Award The Dial Award was presented annually by the Dial Corporation to the male and female American high-school athlete/scholar of the year. Awardees See also *Wendy's High School Heisman The Heisman High School Scholarship in the past kn ...

. His intent in this poem was to do for Paterson,

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delawa ...

what Joyce had done for

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 ...

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the s ...

, in ''Ulysses''. Williams wrote, "All that I am doing (dated) will go into it." In July 1933, he reattempted the theme in an 11-page prose poem, "Life Along the

Passaic River Passaic River ( ) is a river, approximately long, in Northern New Jersey. The river in its upper course flows in a highly circuitous route, meandering through the swamp lowlands between the ridge hills of rural and suburban northern New Jersey, ...

." By 1937, Williams felt he had enough material to start a large-scale poem on Paterson but realized that the project would take considerable time to complete.Mariani, pp. 387–8. Moreover, his then-busy medical practice precluded his attempting such a project at that time. This did not stop Williams from taking some preliminary steps in the meanwhile. He wrote the poem "Paterson, Episode 17" in 1937 and would recycle it into the major work 10 years later. "Morning," written in 1938, was another poem intended for ''Paterson''. In 1939, Williams sent

James Laughlin James Laughlin (October 30, 1914 – November 12, 1997) was an American poet and literary book publisher who founded New Directions Publishing. Early life He was born in Pittsburgh, the son of Henry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin. Laughlin ...

New Directions Publishing New Directions Publishing Corp. is an independent book publishing company that was founded in 1936 by James Laughlin and incorporated in 1964. Its offices are located at 80 Eighth Avenue in New York City. History New Directions was born in 19 ...

an 87-page sheaf of poems labeled "Detail and Parody for the Poem Paterson." This collection as such was not published. However, 15 of its "details," titled "For the Poem Patterson pelling Williams appeared in the collection ''The Broken Span,'' which New Directions released in 1941.

Addressing ''The Waste Land''

One reason Williams deliberated on ''Paterson'' was his longstanding concern about the poem ''

'' by T.S. Eliot, which with its overall tone of disillusionment had tapped into a much larger sense of cultural ennui that had arisen in the aftermath of

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

and become a touchstone for the

Lost Generation The Lost Generation was the social generational cohort in the Western world that was in early adulthood during World War I. "Lost" in this context refers to the "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in th ...

.Mariani, p. 191. As Margaret Lloyd states in her critical reappraisal of ''Paterson'', "many critics and poets indicate their poetical inclinations by aligning themselves specifically with T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, and ... ''Paterson'' was, from its very conception, intended to be a 'detailed reply' (SL, 239) to the Eliot bias of modern poetry." To Williams, Eliot "had moved into a vacuum with his poem," in Mariani's words, and taken American poetry with it. Moreover, Eliot's use of conventional meter (though varied in places by speech rhythms) did not seem endemic to American speech and thus seemed outside the course that American poetry had seemed headed since the poetry of

Walt Whitman Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among ...

. For American poetry (and by extension his own work) to progress, Williams argued, it needed to move away from foreign traditions and classic forms and essentially find its own way.

, with whom Williams was in contact, had felt similarly about ''The Waste Land''.Mariani, p. 250. However, Williams dismissed Crane's reaction to ''The Waste Land'', his long poem '' The Bridge'', as "a direct step backward to the bad poetry of any age but especially to that triumphant regression rench symbolismwhich followed Whitman and imitates...the Frenchman allarméand came to a head in T.S. Eliot excellently." Williams also studied '' The Cantos'' by

, the first 30 parts of which appeared in 1931. While Williams noted that Pound, in Mariani's words, "had managed to lift the language to new heights," he had also "deformed the natural order of speech at times...while somehow saving the excellences and even the forms of old."

Developing form and method

Williams, according to Mariani, concluded that tackling ''Paterson'' meant "to find a way beyond Eliot's poetic, and beyond Pound's, as well...in sculpting the words themselves, words with hard, concrete, denotative jagged edges." At the same time, the New Jersey dialect the poet wanted to set into verse could sound, as biographer Paul Mariani phrases it, "unrelievedly flat." In a note that accompanied the "Detail and Parody" manuscript he sent to New Directions, Williams told Laughlin and his associate Jim Higgins, "They are not, in some ways, like anything I have written before but rather plainer, simpler, more crudely cut...I too have to escape from my own modes." The formal solution eluded Williams into the early 1940s. In December 1943, he wrote Laughlin, "I write and destroy, write and destroy. 'Paterson'' isall shaped up on outline and intent, the body of the thinking is finished but the technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date." Finding a form of American

vernacular A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...

that would facilitate poetic expression, which approximated speech rhythms but avoided the regularity of their patterns as both Joyce and

had done, proved a long trial-and-error process. This period proved doubly frustrating as Williams became impatient with his progress; he wanted to "really go to work on the ground and dig up a Paterson that would be a true Inferno." Williams also studied Pound's ''Cantos'' for clues on how to structure the large work he had in mind.

Muriel Rukeyser Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "ex ...

's ''US1'' also caught Williams' attention for its use, with a technical skill that seemed to rival Pound's in ''The Cantos'', of such diverse and seemingly prosaic materials as notes from a congressional investigation, an X-ray report and a physician's testimony on cross-examination. He wrote to fellow poet

Louis Zukofsky Louis Zukofsky (January 23, 1904 – May 12, 1978) was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge a ...

, "I've begun to think about poetic form again. So much has to be thought out and written out there before we can have any solid criticism and consequently well-grounded work here."As quoted in Mariani, p. 418. In 1944, Williams read a poem by

Byron Vazakas Byron Vazakas (September 24, 1905, New York City - September 30, 1987, Reading, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, whose career extended from the modernist era well into the postmodernist period; nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1947 ...

in ''

Partisan Review ''Partisan Review'' (''PR'') was a small-circulation quarterly "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party USA–affiliated Joh ...

'' that would help lead him to solutions in form and tone for ''Paterson''. Vazakas had written to Williams before the poem had appeared. Williams now wrote Vazakas, praising him for the piece and urging him to collect some of his work into a book. He also asked to see more of Vazakas's work as soon as possible. According to Mariani, the way Vazakas combined "a long prose line" and "a sharply defined, jagged-edged stanza" to stand independent of each other yet remain mutually complementary suggested a formal solution. Williams also found an "extension, a loosening up" in tone in Vazakas's poems—an approach Williams would find seconded in the poem "America" by Russell Davenport in ''

Life Magazine ''Life'' was an American magazine published weekly from 1883 to 1972, as an intermittent "special" until 1978, and as a monthly from 1978 until 2000. During its golden age from 1936 to 1972, ''Life'' was a wide-ranging weekly general-interest ma ...

'' that November. Between these works and Williams's own continued efforts, he hit upon what Mariani calls the "new conversational tone—authoritative, urbane, assured" that Williams sought for his large-scale work. By late June 1944, Williams was working in earnest on the notes he had accumulated for ''Paterson'', "gradually arranging and rearranging the stray bits with the more solid sections" as he approached a "first final draft" of what would become ''Paterson I''. In his preface to the revised edition of ''Paterson'', editor Christopher MacGowan points out that, even with Williams' protracted challenges in finalizing the poem's form, he "seems to have always felt close to the point of solving his formal problems."MacGowan, p. xi. He promised it to Laughlin for the Spring 1943 book list of New Directions. He told Laughlin April 1944 that ''Paterson'' was "near finished" and nine months later that it was "nearing completion." Even after he had received the galley proofs of Book I in September 1945, Williams was dissatisfied and revised the work extensively. This delayed its appearance in print to June 1946.

Composition

Williams saw the poet as a type of reporter who relays the news of the world to the people. He prepared for the writing of ''Paterson'' in this way: The Poetry Foundation's biography on Williams notes the following source:

With roots in his
hort Hort may refer to: People * Erik Hort (born 1987), American soccer player * F. J. A. Hort (1828–1892), Irish theologian * Greta Hort (1903–1967), Danish-born literature professor * Josiah Hort (c. 1674–1751), English clergyman of the ...
1926 poem lso entitled"Paterson," Williams took the city as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought'."Poetry Foundation biography on Williams
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While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained during his research in preparation for its writing. On a worksheet for the poem, he wrote, "Make it factual (as the Life is factual-almost casual-always sensual-usually visual: related to thought)". Williams considered, but ultimately rejected, putting footnotes into the work describing some facts. Still, the style of the poem allowed for many opportunities to incorporate 'factual information', including portions of his own correspondence with the American poet Marcia Nardi and fellow New Jersey poet

Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...

as well as historical letters and articles concerning figures from Paterson's past (like Sam Patch and Mrs. Cumming) that figure thematically into the poem.Bollard (1975), p. 320

Response

The Poetry Foundation biography on Williams notes the following critical response to Williams' Modernist epic:

illiams biographer JamesBreslin reported "reception of the poem never exactly realized his hopes for it." ''Patersons mosaic structure, its subject matter, and its alternating passages of poetry and prose helped fuel criticism about its difficulty and its looseness of organization. In the process of calling ''Paterson'' an "'Ars Poetica' for contemporary America,"
Dudley Fitts Dudley Fitts (April 28, 1903 – July 10, 1968) was an American teacher, critic, poet, and translator. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard University, where he edited the ''Harvard Advocate''. He taught at The Choate Sc ...
complained, "it is a pity that those who might benefit most from it will inevitably be put off by its obscurities and difficulties." Breslin, meanwhile, accounted for the poem's obliqueness by saying, "''Paterson'' has a thickness of texture, a multi-dimensional quality that makes reading it a difficult but intense experience."

Poet/critic

Randall Jarrell Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965) was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poe ...

praised Book I of the poem with the following assessment:

''Paterson (Book I)'' seems to me the best thing William Carlos Williams has ever written. . .the organization of ''Paterson'' is musical to an almost unprecedented degree. . . how wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most delicate lyricism of perception and feeling with the hardest and homeliest actuality should ever have come into being! There has never been a poem more American.Jarrell, Randall. "Paterson by William Carlos Williams." ''No Other Book: Selected Essays''. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

However, Jarrell was greatly disappointed with Books II, III, and IV of the poem, writing the following:

''Paterson'' has been getting rather steadily worse ith each subsequent Book.. All three later books are worse organized, more eccentric and idiosyncratic, more self-indulgent, than the first. And yet that is not the point, the real point: the poetry, the lyric rightness, the queer wit, the improbable and dazzling perfection of so much of Book I have disappeared—or at least, reappear only fitfully.

Awards

The U.S.

National Book Award The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

was reestablished in 1950 with awards by the book industry to authors of 1949 books in three categories. William Carlos Williams won the first National Book Award for Poetry."National Book Awards – 1950"

National Book Foundation The National Book Foundation (NBF) is an American nonprofit organization established, "to raise the cultural appreciation of great writing in America". Established in 1989 by National Book Awards, Inc.,Edwin McDowell. "Book Notes: 'The Joy Luc ...

. Retrieved 2012-02-25.

References

Sources

* Beach, Christopher, ''The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry'' (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). . * Holsapple, Bruce, "Williams on Form: ''Kora in Hell''". In Hatlen, Burton and Demetres Tryphonopoulous (eds), ''William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry'' (Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2002). . * Layne, George W., "Rephrasing Whitman: Williams and the Visual Idiom." In Hatlen, Burton and Demetres Tryphonopoulous (eds), ''William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry'' (Orono, Maine: The National Poetry Foundation, 2002). . * Lloyd, Margaret, ''William Carlos William's Paterson: A Critical Reappraisal'' (London and Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated University Press, 1980). . * Mariani, Paul, ''William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked'' (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1981). . * Williams, William Carlos, ed. Christopher MacGowan, ''Paterson: Revised Edition'' (New York: New Directions, 1992). . {{DEFAULTSORT:Paterson (Poem) American poems 1963 poetry books American poetry collections Poetry by William Carlos Williams National Book Award for Poetry winning works Epic poems in English 1963 poems Modernist poems