[MacArthur]

Masters and Williams II

The Ogre

Sweet child,
little girl with well-shaped legs
you cannot touch the thoughts
I put over and under and around you.
This is fortunate for they would
burn you to an ash otherwise.
Your petals would be quite curled up.

This is all beyond you–no doubt,
yet you do feel the brushings
of the fine needles;
the tentative lines of your whole body
prove it to me;
so does your fear of me,
your shyness;
likewise the toy baby cart
that you are pushing–
and besides, mother has begun
to dress your hair in a knot.
These are my excuses.

The Lonely Street

School is over. It is too hot
to walk at ease. At ease
in light frocks they walk the streets
to while the time away.
They have grown tall. They hold
pink flames in their right hands.
In white from head to foot,
with sidelong, idle look–
in yellow, floating stuff,
black sash and stockings–
touching their avid mouths
with pink sugar on a stick–
like a carnation each holds in her hand–
they mount the lonely street.

William Carlos Williams

Williams is most famous for a couple of minimalist stunts (Red Whellbarrow, etc.) but the above is where he’s at his best…and where he’s been more influential. At a glance, any well-read American can recognize the style that has dominated American poetry in the second half of the XXth Century. Yet both poems were written in the 1920’s when other approaches were current fashion…he was way ahead!

It’s not that much different from Masters. Same Realist aesthetic. Same plein-air language. Same detailed observation and carefully identified imagery. Same commitment to “sense”.

Sometimes Formalists criticise all this sort of thing as “chopped-up prose”, “prose with line-breaks”. Poetry— as far as it doesn’t radically depart from normal syntax— is always prose, with line-breaks. You may or may not add a sauce of alliteration, rhyme or metrical patterning (you could do that to prose composed in paragraphs…it’s been done), but it’s the line-breaks that make it verse.

The main difference is where Williams breaks his lines. Williams’ style is far more sprinkled with enjambments, whereas Masters is fully end-stopped. And that’s come to be more true as the century wore on.

The “natural history” of a poet in North America is apt to be thus: You discover a mature interest in poetry in, say, Junior High. You will be prone to compose your lines as Masters would have. If you have the knack for phrasing and a facility for imagery, you’ll get some approval— and you’ll gradually be admonished to “enjamb more”…some times with happy results, and more often not, but the pressure won’t abate. By the time you graduate MFA you will more or less have the knack of it (picked up from models like Williams). You will have acquired a whole pseudo-science about “technique”-- but it’s really a pretty casual matter. If your poetry receives recognition for some other sort of excellence, you will gradually end-stop your lines more...and get away with it.

It’s at least marginally more difficult to read poetry that’s fairly enjambed, and even the well-trained American literary audience has been drawn into this game— we mistrust poetry as end-stopped as Masters. It’s too easy, and we know poetry is supposed to be hard.

William’s style of poetry is a legit approach. But two things can reasonably be said about it: it doesn’t suit everyone with a genius for poetry, and it’s been done...and done... and done...




[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited February 27, 2002).]