Fictions of Form in Poetry By Stephen Cushman Princeton University Press, 1993 Among the many prose passages that William Carlos Williams incorporated in Paterson is the following brief statement: American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist (140). Taken from a review of several Americans by the British poet-critic George Barker, the statement seems to epitomize the contempt for America's native materials that Williams associated with European culture and its exponents, notably Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Yet by placing this statement within his own text Williams appears to give it a grudging endorsement; the only emendation suggested by his framing of Barker's remark is the addition of an unvoiced yet at the end of the sentence. This implied revision is entirely in keeping with the proleptic tenor of much discourse on poetry. Far more than in other cultures with older histories, the idea of poetry possesses a utopian resonance that clashes with the merely empirical status of poems. The search for poetry, or for some persuasive means of identifying it, has therefore always been more than historical and philological, and indeed has frequently taken on a nearly religious tone. To discuss poetry means to talk as much about apocalyptic transformations of language and vision as about particular poets and poems. In the almost 50 years since Paterson first appeared, poetry has assuredly existed, not least as an academic field generating reams of critical prose annually. But the question raised by Barker and ambivalently echoed by Williams persists, albeit in a different register: Does poetry as such exist? Does it, in other words, have a recognizable character of its own, or must it be seen as an accidental conglomeration of miscellaneous figures and works? This problem has only become more acute as our sense of what should count as poetry expands to include the work of previously neglected women poets, ethnic minorities, experimental writers, political activists, popular lyricists, and oral performers. Given the many sectors of poetic culture, the vastly different audiences and func-