The Verse Line in Williams

Abstract

1. IN THE 1959 INTERVIEWS WITH EDITH HEAL, William Carlos Williams talks of his Complete Collected Poems in 1938 as providing him with whole picture, chance appraise all he gone through technically learn about the making of Then he recounts learning organize poem into lines: greatest problem was that I didn't know how divide poem into what perhaps my lyrical sense wanted. Free verse was not the answer. From the beginning I knew that the American must shape the pattern; later I rejected the word and spoke of the American idiom--this was better word than language, less academic, more identified with speech. (I Wanted 64-65) This kind of statement draws skeptical comments from critics (for example, Cushman 81-83, 99, and Perloff 160). In point of fact, Williams spoke the problem of lineation in letter James Laughlin in 1939. When Laughlin related how his professors at Harvard had told the young editor not mix and visual standards in poetry, Williams was contemptuous. What they, the formulators of that particular question do not know, Williams snapped, that an quality, NEW quality, underlies and determines the visual which they object to (Williams and Laughlin 49). Williams had argued for this throughout the 1930s and proposed formalize it--what he refers above as pattern in verse line. The verse is time; he insisted in 1931, time manifest in and measured by this line. Not forced, metric time but something invented, a time that catches thought as it lags and swings up into the attention (Selected Letters 136). That verse line, the basis of poetic form, was be discovered in--invented from--the American vernacular. (1) Williams's attempts at measuring the vernacular line have largely been dismissed; the sound and shape of his poems remain topic of contention. (2) No doubt visual and aural elements are both at play, and any discussion of Williams's verse line needs consider their interlinking complexities. issue here is twofold. First, if what guides Williams is primarily an auditory quality found in American speech, then exactly in what way are his lines modeled on speech? Second, and more difficult establish, if Williams's prosody is speech-based, how might those lines express, as he insisted, musical time and so be the basis of what he notoriously called new measure? In the following I'll argue that Williams's verse line functions as prosodic device, indicative of several aural factors, chiefly intonation, pace, and rhythm, and that it is fashioned with regard its impact on the total poem--that is, subordinate the poem as whole--rather than functioning simply as visual or rhythmic unit (such as an iambic pentameter line). (3) Further, I'll demonstrate in what ways Williams's prosody is in fact speech-based and show, by listening Williams, how line breaks give clear evidence of his prosodic practice--breaks best explained by use of syntax, intonation, and pace. 2. In December 1931, Williams composed letter Kay Boyle, intended as the opening declaration for incarnation of Contact (Mariani 328-29). His premise was, bluntly, There is no workable poetic extant among us today (Selected Letters 129). He writes of listening speech in my own environment for prosodic model which he'd develop into form. The of poetry, he insists, that of language (4) Because the of poetry is be found in characteristics of the spoken language, Williams will consequently search the vernacular for formal characteristics and argue that Greek prosody emerges from the Greek and English prosody from English. It follows that, because American is distinct from British speech--shaped by relationship place, an argument central In the American Grain (1925) (5)--American poetry should be distinguished by its development from vernacular, hence his later insistence on intrinsic form (Collected II, 54). …