Paterson

Throughout the five books of Paterson, Williams connects the past and the future through a sense of simultaneity. Williams especially uses the history of the Revolutionary War and the formation of America to underpin narratives about the flowering of Paterson. Throughout the text, historical interludes involving the Revolution recur, from anecdotes about Native American religious ceremonies to internecine conflict between Founding Fathers about the development of the American banking system. Sections which cover events, characters, and circumstances from historical realities which occurred centuries apart are spliced right next to each other in the text. Their proximity—one right after another—creates the impression that they happen at the same time. This focus on the history of Paterson as a place connects in the text to the history of poetry and artistic practice; Williams overlays on it his thoughts about the place, meaning, and future of poetry.

As one of the main figures in the artistic movement of Imagism, Williams focused on developing a more modern sense of American poetry as compared to what he and other Imagist poets—including famous figures H.D. and Ezra Pound—saw as the staid conservatism of contemporary poetry. In a question-and-answer section in Book 5, Williams answers an imaginary inquirer who wants to know about his definition of poetry, especially as it regards its future: “Q. Well—is it poetry? // A. We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. It is the American idiom. Rhythmically it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom. It has as much originality as jazz” (225). He connects poetry to a deeply American identity, like jazz; however, he does not mention how African American culture influenced both jazz and his own development of poetic voice.

At the end of Book 1, Williams quotes from Studies of the Greek Poets by John Addington Symonds about deformed metrical verse, and he connects this pattern to a sense of deformed morality—ironic and perhaps tongue-in-cheek, considering his own use of an inconsistent line form and pattern. Williams explores the most summative thoughts about the future of poetry in Book 5; there, he frames the smallest unit of regular metrical verse as being composed of the “tragic foot” (239). He describes the language of poetry as idiomatic, which leads into an assertion that poems should be written in nonstandard language. In both a doubling-back and a doubling-down, the very last lines of the text assert that about poetry “We know nothing and can know nothing / but / the dance, to dance to a measure” (239).

Throughout the five books, Williams occasionally returns to direct reference to the structure of poetry. Most of his verse sections are written in his most common meter: variable-foot free verse. This meter disregards perfect consistency in the poetic lines (with regards to length, meter, and rhyme) in favor of a looser structure and flow to the text. This is not to say that he does not use poetic techniques—to the contrary, in the vein of other Imagist and Imagist-adjacent poets like Gertrude Stein, he frequently uses an internal perfect rhyme scheme to repeat specific word-sounds and thereby evoke connections between sections of text which otherwise do not have a set relationship to one another.