Paterson's Progress

Abstract

Critics have delighted in pointing out puns in Paterson, but none has observed that Williams's verbal play, a play that goes far beyond what we ordinarily think if as punning, provides a mode of progression and a principle or organization in a poem that is always threatening to break down in silence or get lost in the welter of its material-modes and principles that are themselves suggested by the double pun Thomas Whitaker has noted in the poem's title: patters-on and pater-son.1 If it seems an unusual claim that Williams, generally considered less given to verbal play than many of his contemporaries, used puns to propel and organize Paterson, we might turn for a moment to his Autobiography. Written shortly after he had completed Book IV of Paterson, the Autobiography is generated by an etymological pun: Only yesterday, Williams deadpans, while looking into Chapman's Iliad of Homer, did I realize for the first time that the derivation of the adjective venereal is from Venus! And I a physician practicing medicine for the past forty years.2 This radical discovery not only generates the story of Williams's life, it establishes a relationship between verbal play and his lifelong quest for what he calls Beautiful Thing. In the chapter The Practice, the