William Carlos Williams’ Prosody

          It has been convenient for well over a century to distinguish between "classical" and "romantic" poetry, or between the Aristotelian and the Platonic.  The former is "professional" or art poetry, and it derives from the social practices of mankind — storytelling, word-games, lullabies, work songs and suchlike activities.  The latter is "amateur" or, to use Hyatt H. Waggoner's term, "vatic poetry"; its derivation is from the system of "sympathetic magic" which obtained in the world at large before the age of science. The object of vatic poetry is to control the environment of mankind through "words of power": incantations, prayers, charms, blessings, curses, and so forth.

         Professional poets tend to define poetry as "language art," but amateur poets, depending on their particular religious or philosophical set of mind, define poetry in more circumscribed ways, as "vision" or "prophecy" or "revelation" or "ecstasy," as Waggoner has discussed.  Such poets consider language not as their primary focus, not as the substance of their product, poetry, but rather as the vehicle for their religious experience, whatever it may be.

         On Sunday, October 19, 1969, there was a fine article in the New York Times Magazine by Arthur Koestler: "Man — One of Evolution's Mistakes?" What, according to Koestler, are the possibilities for the poet? First there is pure intellectuality, the activity of the human brain’s neocortex — classicism, what I have called “professional poetry.” Then there is extreme hypothalamiumism, the activity of the hypothalamus, the unthinking animal brain — pure gut-romanticism such as Theodore Roethke espoused when he courted the edge of madness, what I have called “amateur” poetry, but might better be named “priest poetry,” visionary poetry.

Koestler felt it was impossible for poets — in the manner of Robert Bly, for instance — to attempt to establish actual communication between the human cortex and the hypothalamus because the animal brain does not understand rationality. It's stupid. All it can do is feel. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see my essay titled "Sympathetic Magic" in Visions and Revisions of American Poetry or in Heyen's volume, both cited in the bibliography below. See also the essays on Robert Bly and Theodore Roethke elsewhere on this blog.)

However, it might be possible to try to understand the animal mind, to filter the emotions it produces through the thinking brain.  This is man attempting to understand itself.  Probably most great (i.e., non-exclusive or unlimited) art does this, which may explain why visionaries cannot understand the arguments of craftsmen such as Poe — they're operating on intuitive-truth principles.  Faith — animal gut reaction — cannot be subverted by argument.  These facts also may explain why craftsmen can understand visionary points of view, though those views may be rejected.  No wonder my preacher father was never swayed by argument, nor visionaries like Gandhi.  Argument with them is useless.

         A third sort of poet, however, besides the professional and the amateur, is the "agonist" — a professional who is as committed to language art as any other poet, but who is more interested in theories than in performance.  Sometimes such poets — as for instance Wallace Stevens — will embody their theories in poetry rather than in essays.

Although William Carlos Williams was a member of the great Modernist generation of the 20th century, he remained a poetry activist until his death in 1963 and was always, in his own way, a propagandist who made great claims for a liberal America in his poetry.  Williams was not, however, a Stevens-style agonist, for it was not in his poetry that he did most of his theorizing; rather, it was in his letters to young poets, and in the comparatively little prose he published — sometimes in his long pastiche poem, Paterson, in In the American Grain, and in Something to Say which, according to its editor, "collects all of Williams' known writings — reviews, essays, introductions, and letters to the editor — on the two generations of poets that followed him, from Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky to Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg."  None of the great Modernists, not even Ezra Pound, was more generous and welcoming to new talent, more encouraging of the development of new voices and styles, or more insistent that these be recognizably American.

         Despite William Carlos Williams' charter membership in the school of Modernist poets originally called "Les Imagistes" by its founder, Ezra Pound, and his public adherence to the movement's slogan, "No ideas but in things," which he coined, Williams was in fact very much interested in the dance of language. Imagism gave rise subsequently to Robert Bly's "deep image surrealism," among other movements including Charles Olson's Black Mountain school and Charles Reznikoff's cadre of "Objectivists," both of which split their loyalties between Williams and Pound.  Yet it was Williams' interest in prosodic theory and his invention of a variably accentual three-line unit that gave rise to Olson's opaque theories of "projective verse" — often reprinted but never adequately interpreted — and to many later attempts to justify prose-mode poetry as some sort of "free verse," as Stephen Cushman did in an essay titled "Forms of Poetry."  "What we have wanted," Cushman quoted Williams as saying, "is a line that will allow us room in which to develop the opportunities of a new language, a line loose as Whitman's, but measured as his was not."

         Some critics consider that Williams was a proselytizer for a certain kind of amateur poetry; he was a sort of American prophet following Whitman and, many have argued, the Whitman line, for American "poetry" isn't about language, it isn't about art, it's about patriotism, in a peculiar way.  Stephen Tapscott wrote, "Williams chose Whitman as an appropriate model because Williams needed to invent a tradition to join," for, as Williams remarked to his son, "I have wanted to link myself up with traditional art."

         George S. Lensing, discussing the Tapscott book in his essay, "Williams after the First Quarter-Century," wrote, "Whitman was American, vernacular, committed to place, experimental in form, consciously rebellious — all qualities extolled by Williams.  Whitman's transcendentalism, however, was regarded with suspicion; and many of the formal experiments, according to Williams, failed."  In other words, Williams did not see himself as a prose-mode vatic poet like Whitman.

         American poetry, when it was defined by Emerson and Whitman, was defined specifically as vatic poetry, but a particular kind, in order to distinguish it from European amateur poetry.  American poetry was to be anti-formal, intuitive, "organic."  Whitman, as the prime poet-prophet of America, was concerned with mythicizing American experience in this "new" way.  It is itself a myth, however, that Williams was essentially a Whitmanian.

         Waggoner claimed that Williams "really knew very little about Whitman." Williams was interested in only part of Whitman's program.  Waggoner talked about the mainstream of American poetry deriving from Whitman and Emerson, but then he made distinctions among those poets who derive directly from Emerson's Transcendentalist credo, those who derive directly from Whitman's prose-poetry practice, and those who derive from a combination of the two.

         Williams derives primarily from Whitman's practice, not from Emerson's agonism.  That is to say, Williams was interested in Whitman's attempt to write in prose, thus getting away from traditional British practice.  Rather than write prose poems, however, Williams wanted to write in a "measured" line.  For many years he experimented, and finally Williams invented a verse prosody — variable accentuals — that looks, acts, and sounds like prose most of the time (see the entry on the "Triversen" in The Book of Forms, Third Edition).  In this way he was like Whitman superficially.

         Williams was also interested in the "common man," as Whitman professed to be, but in Williams' poetry the reader will find real people whereas in Whitman's work one may find laborers mentioned and over-mentioned in catalogs of people, but the only person one will find is Whitman himself, or at least the image of himself that he projected.  Williams was interested in Everyman; Whitman was interested in himself as the symbol of Everyman, but it is a tossup which of these two poets was more responsible for the proliferation of "democratic" poetic schools and canons in mid-twentieth-century American poetry.

         To say that Ezra Pound and the Imagist poets were influenced not only by Whitman's practice but also by Japanese poetry — especially the haiku — is to utter a truism, but the argument can be made that Williams deliberately invented an American accentual stanza in his "triversen" that is the equivalent of the Japanese haiku — or, more exactly, the three-line katauta, as I have discussed in chapter 12, "Of Imagery," in Poetry: An Introduction (q.v. bibliography).  In effect, in his earliest poems — those to be found in the first volume of his Collected Poems, from which all the illustrations used here have been taken — Williams adapted to American poetry the syllabic prosody of the haiku and katauta by transmuting it: syllables became stresses; the seventeen syllables of the haiku and the nineteen syllables of the katauta, arranged in three lines of 5-7-5 or 5-7-7 syllables, became a "variable foot," to use Williams' terminology, also arranged in three lines.

         Besides the "variable foot," Williams talked about the "breath pause," an accentual prosody version of the katauta which is, according to Brower and Miner, "A fragmentary form of three lines of 5, 7, 7 syllables.  Sometimes used in pairs for dialogue; suggests incompleteness when alone."  There are actually two forms that are called "katautas"; both are formal, but only one is a stanza form per se, and both are based upon spontaneous "utterances" which, in the Japanese tradition, are sudden, emotive words, as in the first line of Williams' poem "Mujer":

 

                  Oh, black Persian cat!

 

The first form of the katauta is an emotive question or its answer, as in lines two and three of the same poem:

 

                  Was not your life

                  already cursed with offsprings?

                                                         (Collected Poems, Vol. I, 78)

 

A pair of such katautas is a mondo as in Williams' poem "The Hunter," stanzas two and three:

 

                  Where will a shoulder split or

                  a forehead open and victory be?

 

                  Nowhere.

                  Both sides grow older.

                                                         (CP I, 164)

 

Mondos may look like the Western syllogism and appear in similar parallel constructions, as for instance in stanza one of Williams' "The Fool's Song":

 

                  I tried to put a bird in a cage.

                                    O fool that I am!

                           For the bird was Truth.

                  Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put

                                    Truth in a cage!

                                                        (CP I, 5-6)

 

But the katauta answer is not derived logically; it is intuited, as in the Zen koan or "unanswerable question," for Zen Buddhism is at the root of the haiku.  As Yoel Hoffman noted, "Zen literature eventually came to serve as a means to enlightenment in Zen monasteries.  Several times a week, every monk would meet alone with the master.  The latter would tell an anecdote or present a koan, a sort of problem or riddle from Zen literature.  The monk's response would not necessarily be verbal, and it is often difficult to see the connection between the answer and the anecdote." An example of such intuition is to be found in lines two through four of Williams' "Fire Spirit":

 

                  I am old.

                  You warm yourselves at these fires?

                  In the center of these flames

                  I sit, my teeth chatter!

                  Where shall I turn for comfort?

                                                        (CP I, p. 58)

 

The last line in this strophe is a rhetorical question, not a katauta question, and the first line is merely a statement, not an emotive utterance.  One can see the difference between the two sets of lines if lines one and five are juxtaposed —

 

                  I am old.

                  Where shall I turn for comfort?

 

or, in reverse order,

 

                  Where shall I turn for comfort?

                  I am old.

 

— and then set against the three middle lines:

 

                  You warm yourself at these fires?

                  In the center of these flames

                  I sit, my teeth chatter!

 

This cannot be said to be a logical consequence of a rational action.

         The second kind of katauta is a stanza or poem form.  It is made up of three parts arranged in lines of 5-7-7 syllables, these lengths being approximately breath-length, or the appropriate lengths in which to ask a sudden, emotive question and respond to it, also emotively.  Seventeen syllables — as in the haiku, or nineteen — as in the katauta, are as many as can normally be uttered in one short breath; five to seven syllables are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer.  The Japanese poet Igarashi wrote of this basic and organic unit of Japanese poetry, "Katauta is a poem of three lines in which the first two lines consist of one short and one long one; and the last line is the same length as the second line, which is added as a prop to help harmonize the rhythm.  This is the unit of Japanese poetry." (Poetry: An Introduction, 163)

         In Williams' "variable foot" accentual prosody version of this unit, two to four stresses are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer, and six to twelve stresses are the outer limits of the utterance of a question and its intuitive "answer."  Arranging these stresses and emotive utterances into lines not exceeding four stresses each, one will have a stanza or poem three lines in length, each line being equal to one phrase.  In fact, this system in grammatic prosodies is called "lineating" (by Cushman and others) or "line-phrasing," and there is such a grammatical element in some Japanese forms as well, particularly in the tanka which, like the katauta, takes two forms. (Brower, 511; Hoffman, 19-22)

         Both forms of the tanka are externally alike in that they are quintet poems with lines, in this order, of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. In the first tanka form, called the waka, one subject is treated in the first two lines, another in the next two, and the last line is a refrain or paraphrase or restatement: 5-7, 5-7, 5.  The first two lines are a dependent clause or a phrase, the last three an independent clause.  Grammatically, Williams often did similar things with his stanzas: note the stanza from "The Fool's Song" above.

         The second type of tanka consists of two parts.  The first three lines are an independent unit ending in a noun or verb after which a turn takes place: 5-7-5, 7-7.  The triplet is an observation, the couplet is a comment on the observation.  Returning to Williams' "Fire Spirit," and dropping the first line to last position, we have the form — disregarding syllabification — of this kind of tanka:

 

                  You warm yourself at these fires?

                  In the center of these flames

                  I sit, my teeth chatter.

 

                  Where shall I turn for comfort?

                  I am old.

 

         In his poem "Epitaph" Williams used this same division though, again, not the syllabification:

 

                  An old willow with hollow branches

                  slowly swayed his few high bright tendrils

                  and sang:

 

                  Love is a young green willow

                  shimmering at the bare wood's edge.

                                                      (CP I, 160)

 

The second line of this poem is unusually long for Williams, and it does not fit the "variable foot" pattern in that it is a line of more than four stresses.  Williams wanted to avoid the English iambic pentameter line, and his development of the triversen stanza allowed him to do so.  The stress pattern of "Epitaph" is as follows, (where the breve [x] stands for an unstressed syllable, the accent ['] stands for a primary stressed syllable, and the dot [.] stands for a secondary stressed syllable):

 

                  1.         x''xx'x'x

                  2.         'x'x'.x'x

                  3.         x'

 

                  4.         'xx'.'x

                  5.         'x.x'.' (r-glide elision in shimmering.)

 

Line two is heavily overstressed, or "sprung," with alliteration and assonance so that, though it has too many stresses to fit the triversen pattern, it nevertheless avoids the five-stress regularity of iambic pentameter, accentual-syllabic verse.  Line five is exactly five stresses long, but the elision of "shim'ring" and the springing of the last three syllables avoid pentameter as well.

         A renga, according to Brower, is "Linked verses.  Historically two different forms, both involving more than one author.  The earlier form, called tanrenga, or "short renga," is a “tanka” whose first three lines were composed by one poet, and last two lines by another;..."  This final couplet response is the hanka.  A renga chain or "long renga" is a poem made of a sequence of rengas and composed by two or more authors.  The first triplet sets the subject, the succeeding couplet and all ensuing triplets and couplets amplify, gloss, or comment upon the first triplet. Various other changes might also be rung upon the long renga, but what is important to this discussion is the development of the haiku from the tanka and the renga.

         The tanka developed from an older form, the choka, which was a poem written in alternating 5-7-syllable lines.  The conclusion of the choka would be, often, an envoy that doubled the last 7-syllable line: 5-7-7 — the katauta — or that consisted of two choka couplets with a doubled last line: 5-7-5-7-7 — the tanka. One can see the katauta is the base of the tanka, and one can see the haiku growing out of the first three lines of the tanka.  But it was from the renga chain that the hokku developed.  The word is Chinese in origin, and it came to specify in Japanese poetry the first triplet of a renga chain.  This first verse set the theme of the chain and was the most important part of the poem, the rest of which, beginning with the succeeding 7-7-syllable hanka couplet, served to elaborate upon or gloss the hokku. The hokku of a renga chain ended with a full stop — it was complete by itself.

         The term haikai no renga applies to the humorous renga chain, and it means, specifically, "renga of humor." By various stages the term haiku — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables.  The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations.  It became a poem that had as its basis emotive utterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element.

         Ideally the haiku, though complete in itself, would be open-ended in that its statement would "reverberate" beyond itself into overtone.  Williams' "The Soughing Wind" is a good example of what the haiku poet tries to accomplish by way of suggestion:

 

                  Some leaves hang late, some fall

                  before the first frost — so goes

                  the tale of winter branches and old bones.

                                                               (CP I, 158)

 

         The haiku has perhaps been best described as a moment of intense perception.  A distinction is sometimes made between the senryu and the haiku, though both have the same syllabic form.  The senryu was originally a parodic haiku, but in its serious aspect it has been characterized as an inquiry into the nature of man; the haiku, an inquiry into the nature of the universe.  (Poetry: An Introduction, 168-9)  There seems to be a number of dualities in the Japanese tradition: two kinds of katautas, two kinds of tankas, and two kinds of haiku.

         Williams was particularly successful in adapting to American poetics not only Japanese metrical theory, but also the spirit of the haiku to the American sensibility.  Many other Western poets have been notably unsuccessful in writing good haiku or haiku-style poetry, and this failure has to do with their attempting what Williams did not attempt to do: naturalize Zen Buddhism, of which the haiku is a relatively recent outgrowth.

         Haiku translated into English often appear to members of Occidental cultures to be overly sentimental.  The Zen poet attempts to put the self into the thing perceived, to do more than empathize with it and "become one" with the thing; thus, by extension, with all things. In Western traditions empathizing with objects is sentimental; there is even a term, "the pathetic fallacy," to describe the state of excessive personification or over-empathy.  If American poets try to become one with the object of their perception, their work will appear to be self-indulgent and egocentric.  Williams doubtless understood his danger, for, as has been noted above, it was he who gave Les Imagistes their slogan, "No ideas but in things."  It was T. S. Eliot, though, who produced the theory that Williams put into practice, the theory of "the objective correlative": the poet must choose that object which will be the idea, not merely the symbol of the idea, which was the theory of another Modernist school, the Symbolists.  Another Williams poem, "Spring," will illustrate:

 

                  O my grey hairs!

                  You are truly white as plum blossoms.

                                                               (CP I, 158)

 

         The "objective correlative" is nothing more than the "vehicle" of the metaphor of the poem, the figure of speech that carries the weight of the identification of one object with another, dissimilar, object.  In this Williams couplet mote the "grey hairs" is the tenor or subject of the metaphor, and "plum blossoms" — a traditional Japanese symbol for spring, incidentally — is the vehicle or object; that is, the "objective correlative": that object which is relative to the idea of the tenor.  In the context of the poem the objective correlative allows the implication or overtone that something old can paradoxically be young.  The hairs are at once white and wintry, white and spring-like.  Williams' "idea-in-the-thing" substitutes for Zen Buddhist "thing-empathy," but much of the effect of the Zen identification with an object is preserved, though the observer of the poem is emotionally severed from the perceived article.  It is through this objectivity or aesthetic distance, finally, that the poet in English — at least a poet like Williams — achieves empathy, which is only a way of saying that there is no such thing as pure objectivity where human beings are concerned.

         As a final support for the thesis that the Japanese forms are analogous to Imagist poetry in English, and specifically that the Japanese 5-7-5-syllable count is analogous to Williams' phrasal-accentual prosody, here is Williams 1916 poem "Marriage":

 

                  So different, this man

                  And this woman:

                  A stream flowing

                  In a field.

 

                                    (CP I, 56)

 

         The original version of this poem is a sentence that has been line- phrased; that is to say, the sentence has been broken into phrases and each phrase has become a line.  This is the stressing pattern:

 

                  1.  ''x''

                  2.  x''x

                  3.  x''x

                  4.  .x'

 

         The first syllable of line four is promoted because, in the sentence, it is the middle syllable in a series of three unstressed syllables (see “The Rules of Scansion” in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, op. cit.).  Thus, in this early poem there are no more than four, and no fewer than two strong stresses in any line, as in the triversen stanza, but there are four lines here, not three. However, if the lines of this poem are rearranged in syllabic lengths of 5-7-5, the poem becomes a perfect three-line senryu:

 

                     So different, this

                  man and this woman: a stream

                     flowing in a field.

 

                                    (Poetry: An Introduction, 170)

 

         The senryu itself first showed up unmistakably in Williams' poetry only three pages farther along in the Collected Poems, on page 59, as the 1917 poem titled "Chinese Nightingale":

                  Long before dawn your light

                  Shone in the window, Sam Wu;

                  You were at your trade.

Its syllabification is off by only one syllable in the first line, but the poem is a lineated compound sentence.

         The prosody Williams developed from Japanese sources has become widely dispersed among American poets since its early appearances in short, haiku-like poems written by the Imagists.  Williams himself soon used it as a stanza pattern, developing out of the haiku a triplet, each line of which equals one phrase, the whole triplet equal to one independent clause, each line containing no more than four stressed syllables and generally no fewer than two.

         In Williams' work there are literally dozens of poems that fit this description.  The triversen stanza first showed up in section VII of the 1923 Spring and All, and thereafter it occurred with increasing frequency in his work, though it cannot be claimed that it became his mainstay strophe.

         To list examples of the triversen stanza and of pseudo-haiku in the work of other poets would be an endless task, but one other poet who did fine things in the Japanese tradition — once only, and atypically — was Wallace Stevens in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird" (see elsewhere on this blog), his only truly Imagist, as distinguished from Symbolist, poem. But in "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" Stevens not only wrote a poem in triversen stanza, he glossed Williams' Imagist credo as well.

ADDENDUM

This following short series of poems, taken from The Book of Forms, Third Edition, cited below, illustrates a number of the Japanese forms and their chronological development and evolution toward the haiku (it may also be found in Fearful Pleasures, cited below):

 

PARADIGM

 

         Why does the brook run?

The banks of the stream are green.               — mondo

 

         Why does the stream run?

The banks of the brook bloom

with roe and cup-moss, with rue.                  — katauta

 

         The trees are filled with

cups.  Grain in the fields, straw men

         talking with the wind.

Have you come far, water-

         borne, wind-born?  Here are

hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.                 — choka

 

         When the spears bend as

you walk through vervain or broom,

         call out to the brook —

it will swell in your veins as

you move through broom or vervain.               — waka (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

         Have you spoken aloud?  Here,

where the swallows' crewel-work

         sews the sky with mist?

You must cut the filament.

You must be the lone spider.                          — tanka (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

         The bole is simple:

Twig and root like twin webs in

         air and earth like fire.                            — haiku (5-7-5)

WORKS CITED

Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford: Stanford University               Press, 1961.

Stephen Cushman, "Forms of Poetry," Sewanee Review, xcvi:1, Winter 1988.

Heyen, William, ed., American Poets in 1976, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.

Yoel Hoffman, ed. & tr., Japanese Death Poems, Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986.

George S. Lensing, Collected Poems, New York: Knopf, 1957.

Stephen Tapscott, American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON 

——, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

——, Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing, Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Company, 1973.

——, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,UArkansasPress  1986. Paperback, $12.95. 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present, Boston: Houghton, 1968; rev. ed., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems, Vol. I, 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan, New York: New Directions, 1986.

——-, In the American Grain, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1925.

——-, Paterson, New York: New Directions, 1963.

——- Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, ed. James E. B. Breslin, New York: New Directions, 1985.

——-, Spring and All, Paris: n.p., 1923.

This essay first appeared in The Cloverdale Review, 1992/93, pp. 37-49, copyright 1993 and 2000 by Lewis Putnam Turco, all rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without the specific written permission of the author.