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    "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
    "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
    "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
    Ebook751 pages16 hours

    "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams

    By Herbert Leibowitz

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    Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era-Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others-Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking to invent an entirely fresh and singularly American poetic, whose subject matter derived from the everyday lives of the citizens and poor immigrant com­munities of northern New Jersey. His poems mirrored both the conflicts of his own life and the convulsions that afflicted American society-two world wars, a rampaging flu pan-demic, and the Great Depression.

    Leibowitz's biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative. "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" is both a long-overdue assessment of a major American writer and an entertaining examination of the twentieth-century avant-garde art and poetry scene, with its memorable cast of eccentric pioneers, includ­ing Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 8, 2011
    ISBN9781466806474
    "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
    Author

    Herbert Leibowitz

    Herbert Leibowitz has been the editor of the literary magazine Parnassus since he helped found it in 1973. He is author of "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams. He lives in New York.

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      "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" - Herbert Leibowitz

      One

      Poetry as Biographical Evidence

      1.

      The high priests of the New Criticism schooled their acolytes in an art of reading poems that elevated technique—modulations of meter, subtle shifts in tone, adroit maneuvers with syntax, ironies planted in dramatic monologues to detonate later—to an unaccustomed sovereignty. The critic explained how a poem worked, much as a chemist explained the elements of the periodic table: which words caused catalytic change and which entropy, which mixtures were volatile and which inert. According to this view, a poem chartered its own laws, which were often proudly tortuous, even baffling. Nothing was what it appeared to be: the most innocent line might shelter a furtive renegade who aimed to overturn conventional order and install ambiguity in its place. The job of the critic was to ferret out linguistic clues scattered on and below the poem’s surface and, through patient analysis, put the circuitry back together. For this task, a poet’s biography—his idyllic childhood or poisoned upbringing, his strivings to escape the yoke of poverty, racial bigotry, religious strictness, or even gentility—was deemed either irrelevant or mere raw material to be stored away or disposed of like slag, a by-product of the poetic process.

      Under New Critical rules, all poets were not created equal. John Donne and Richard Crashaw prospered because they brandished witty paradox like expert swordsmen. Their poems demanded the close scrutiny and concentration of solving a chess problem. Romantic poets such as Shelley and Wordsworth, allegedly guilty of talking too much or too emotionally, were often disparaged as clumsy versifiers and bombastic idealists who clung to literalism, and therefore were assigned nosebleed seats in the bleachers at Elysian Fields.

      Although the New Critics undeniably taught two generations to read poems more alertly and to respect their intricately spun webs, forms, and textures, the poet in their scheme mostly was seen as creating the verbal artifact in the manner of a demiurge, then withdrawing to the sidelines, becoming a spectator as the critics dissected—or scavenged—his creation. The poet’s intentions, motives, if not his experience, counted for little compared to the striations and glazes of, or cracks in, his well-wrought urn. Biography could only distract the reader from his duty as inspector of a poem’s structural soundness or fault lines; dwelling on incidents from the poet’s life would lead to sentimentality or a sloppy impressionism that corrupted and trivialized the work itself. Interpreting Donne’s The Flea, New Critics might mention in passing the youthful sexual escapades that landed Donne in prison, but even such pivotal events inspired little commentary. A peculiar bias blinded them to the fact that discordia concors, what Dr. Johnson defined as a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike, might reside in the metaphysical poet’s character as well as in his style, that hyperbole and poetic conceits are a psychological thumbprint left on a poem and worthy of study and speculation. Curiously, the ironies and puns that the New Critics reveled in analyzing often resemble the slips of the tongue and dreams Freud interpreted so methodically as clues to unconscious motives, conflicts, character flaws, and erratic patterns of development.

      Strong hostility was generated in many quarters to biographers who ventured to investigate just such constellations and their relation to poems and novels. If the individual begins, the psychotherapist and literary critic Adam Phillips asks, with an always recondite sense of himself, how can the biographer penetrate the inner life of a Hemingway or an Ezra Pound? Leslie Stephen’s answer, with a great deal of guesswork, could only galvanize the skeptics among the historians and theorists who scoffed at the very idea of seeking the sources of creativity and identity crises in unconscious mental processes. They dismissed it as mystical mumbo jumbo or an illicit method that substituted unverifiable suppositions about a poet’s erotic fantasies, say, for precise documentary proof. In a New York Review of Books essay several years ago, Joyce Carol Oates excoriated biographers for their Wal-Mart version of psychoanalysis that she labeled pathography, a term of opprobrium that gained wide circulation. Oates viewed the biographers’ efforts as tawdry and exploitative, the projection of their own neuroses and unconscious agendas on their helpless subjects’ lives. Putting Hemingway and Pound retroactively on an analyst’s couch is futile and hubristic, since no biographer can ever know exactly what his subject was thinking. No wonder Dr. Johnson observed in his Life of Cowley, Actions are visible though motives are secret, and Emily Dickinson remarked acerbically to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the biographied. It’s true that dead artists cannot refute the calumnies that sometimes mar the interpretations of their behavior.* Nonetheless, biography is not a branch of pathography or fantasy that specializes in reductive

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