In Five Philosophical Essays: “Faith and Knowledge,” written a few years before the publications of “The Wanderer,” Kora in Hell, and Spring and All, Williams asserts that death, decay, and destruction are laws of nature and are therefore inexorable. Though the laws of nature do not change, he does: “I have found that against the tyranny of the law I have a power, knowledge, to make me no longer its slave but its master, that law serves me and not I it.”166 Echoing Emersonian self-reliance, Williams says that when religious men come to him descrying his knowledge as lack of faith, he notes that they themselves depend on the innovations arrived at through knowledge: “Yet they are cloaked out in my symbols, which I have made.”167 The ideas in this essay are significant in several ways; first, the
166William Carlos Williams and Ron Loewinsohn, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The
Embodiment of Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1974), 155.
description of winter in “Faith and Knowledge” must inform the analogous images of winter and hell that arise in Kora in Hell: if winter in “Faith and Knowledge” is a law of nature, and hell and winter are twin images in Kora, then hell must share the quality of being a law of nature. Like other laws of nature, hell can be mastered, as Williams demonstrates in Kora in Hell.
Though Williams is known for finding mass culture problematic for its banality, he is receptive to the liberation afforded by science and technology, as evidenced in the tools and protections the people of faith rely on in “Faith and Knowledge.” These “symbols, which I have made,” are an extension of Williams in a way that nature is not, and are therefore not the same type as the Romantic symbol. The symbol is a thing. Though technology and mechanization are often seen as the source of evil and alienation among twentieth-century artists and thinkers, Williams sees them as more an extension of himself than even nature is. Though Emerson, too, looks favorably on industrial materials as part of the unity of the universe, Williams retains a sharper distinction between individual and world. And while tools and innovation are linked to their creator, the antagonism between nature and artifice actually forms the basis of Williams’ art.168 This distinction also leads Williams to locate art within the world of nature, due to its origin in human speech. Poetry that is disconnected from natural language falls in the realm of artifice, and that is what Williams objects to.
168I concur with Barry Ahearn’s stance that, “It has long been a critical commonplace to speak of Williams’s divided nature (?)… The argument of this book is that this truism is not simply an important feature of Williams’s character, but the defining feature, and that it becomes the defining feature of his early poetry” (Preface to William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry (1994)).
Because Williams holds to this distinction, he sharply breaks with Emerson’s
glorification and the unity between humankind and nature: “the Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it.”169 Emerson also locates the source of fragmentation, strife, and imperfection in spiritual disconnection from God:
For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching things even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable fact. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.170 A close comparison between Emerson’s The Poet and Williams’ Philosophical Essays may initially suggest a greater similarity than I claim at the beginning of this section. Williams makes a very similar description of unity in nature in his second philosophical essay, “Beauty and Truth”:
Interest seized me and in turn I finally grasped the simple fact that all nature is but a complex arrangement; that the few elements, perhaps one, governed by law, take on shapes, form, which cannot be directly analyzed, for as forms have no substance. At the first attempt your form goes and your elements return…. All nature began to arrange itself as the elements had done, into a remarkable system in which I could detect trends, leadings, and so I discovered other laws, which laws never changed but always shuffled the elements about in an identical way.... Here was something then, this law, which I had never seen, that I could not touch or grasp yet which I knew to exist. I called it an abstraction, then a truth, because it was permanent.171
169Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1983), 453.
170Ibid., 455.
Williams concludes that “all nature is but a complex arrangement,” and that this unity is a law, because it is permanent. Though this passage seems to echo Emerson’ universality of nature, God, and man, Williams crucially concludes that the laws, and therefore unity, are intangible and invisible, and that they can only be known in specific, material things. Unity is always a potentiality, and therefore always in the future, but never presently attainable
materially or spiritually. Furthermore, the world of things is never fully subsumed into the self, and it is always before the subject, awaiting perception. Whereas Emerson may find this problematic, Williams finds it an exhilarating challenge for the poet to perceive, to know, and then to extend through creative activity.
But even though Williams emphasizes the division between self and world of things, he does not adopt what Rapp and J. Hillis Miller assert is a Romantic “opposition between the inner world of the subject and the outer world of things.”172 I believe that the return to the ordinary and immediate is essential for understanding Williams, and it is very different from Rapp’s Keatsian reading of Williams’ “The Wanderer”: “Only from… outside of, or
independent of, ordinary experience—can experience itself be contemplated as a whole.”173 Rapp claims that Williams and Keats are alike in that, “Being, as it were, on the outside of everything, [the poet’s narrator] can look into anything with an intensity that an ordinary involvement with the thing would preclude.”174 But this is exactly the version of wholeness through abstraction that Williams ultimately rejects in “Beauty and Truth,” written around
172Rapp, quoting Miller in “The Wanderer,” in William Carlos Williams and Romantic
Idealism, 4.
173Carl Rapp, “The Wanderer,” in William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism, (Providence: Brown University Press, 1984), 17.
the same time as “The Wanderer.” Standing outside the ordinary is indeed anathema to Williams’ creed: “No ideas but in things.” Even though he retains the subject-object distinction, Williams’ subject never fully steps outside of things. His relationship to the world is indeed new and distinct from idealism’s conception of subject and object.
Rapp further asserts that “therefore, the phenomenal world must be transcended or used in such a way that it points beyond itself. This paradox wherein the phenomenal world is both affirmed and negated is inherent not only in Williams’ work but in Romantic poetry generally.”175 In another essay entitled “Philosophy, Science, and Poetry,” Williams does claim that “There is a unity, of course, and the final term of all investigation; it is the
individual himself.”176 However, although this self is always distinct from the world of things that he inhabits, it does not assume the transcendent preeminence that Rapp suggests. Unlike the Romantic ego, Williams’ subjective unity is bounded. Though knowledge of things brings him to a knowledge of self as its own unity, Williams believes that this sense of unity should not inform his future perceptions of things:
Anyone must have as his fundamental determination a complete association of all the activities of his life and their implications. It is the various implications which
constitute the sciences, arts, philosophies and so forth. But the unity they seek is behind them not ahead. Before them exists only an infinite fracture, and ever smaller division…177
Regarding the poetry of Marianne Moore, Williams writes that the reader
[W]ill perceive absolutely nothing except that his whole preconceived scheme of values has been ruined. And this is exactly what he should see, a break through all
175Ibid., 20.
176William Carlos Williams, “Philosophy, Science, and Poetry,” in The Embodiment of
Knowledge, Five Philosophical Essays, (New York: New Directions, 1974), 73. 177Ibid., 73.
preconception of poetic form and mood and pace, a flaw, a crack in the bowl. It is this that one means when he says destruction and creation are simultaneous.178
Just as the imagination is not to impose prior associations on each new moment of
perception, so also one’s sense of unity is not to impose itself on the future. For Williams, unity is compartmentalized and limited to the past and present, and it has no bearing on the future. Thomas Joswick argues exactly this in his 1997 essay, Beginning with Loss: William Carlos Williams’ Poetics: “[Williams] implies that the unity of his writing is present only as it opens toward a future and anticipates a later presence, as if a final closure that might truly unify his writing as a ‘thing’ exists on a horizon that is always yet to come.”179 This future unity rises out of a chaotic and fragmented past, hence “destruction and creation / are simultaneous.”180 Present unity is vulnerable to future destruction, which ultimately leads back to unity when viewed with the clear perception of imagination.