john montague and william carlos williams: nationalism and poetic construction

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

John Montague and William Carlos Williams: Nationalism and Poetic ConstructionAuthor(s): Paul BowersSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Dec., 1994), pp. 29-44Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25513000 .

Accessed: 13/06/2014 00:11

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Canadian Journal of Irish Studies and Canadian Association of Irish Studies are collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.109.162 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:11:28 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cjis

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25513000?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


John Montague and William Carlos Williams: Nationalism and Poetic Construction

PAUL BOWERS

Frank Kersnowski suggests that John Montague's poetry is characterized

by a "tension" between the colloquial and the rhetorical, and by implication,

modernity and tradition. He argues that Montague, particularly in his early poems, had "yet to decide whether to let the colloquial increase its importance in his poetry or to pursue the more rhetorical mode of the past" (Kersnowski

20). What he identifies as "tension" between the colloquial and rhetorical

is part of complex web of dichotomies found in Montague's poetry: his

desire to account for Ireland's past and present, its ancient mythology and

continuing political crises, to write poetry that is distinctly Irish, but also

international, and to speak in the language of the present, without ignoring the past.1 Kersnowski notes that this ongoing tension between Montague's desire to be an Irish poet who also can be "productive and comfortable in

several cultures," increased after Montague studied in America during the

1950s (25). There was, of course, one prominent American poet who spent a long

career struggling with such dichotomies: how to write poetry that is colloquial, ie., modern, and poetry that evokes, unmistakably, a national identity.

William Carlos Williams conducted a workshop at Iowa, with John Montague in attendance.

In an interview with Stephen Arkin, Montague recalls meeting Williams, and says it was "most impressive" (Arkin 233). Williams is said to have held

up one of Montague's poems, declared it "good," but added it was not

"written in the American line." "I could see his face drop when he heard me,"

Montague recalls, "because of course it wasn't in the American line; it was

in the Irish voice, or at least an approximation of the Irish voice." The encounter with Williams, and the subsequent "chat under the stars" made

such an impression that Montague later commemorated the occasion in "William Carlos Williams, 1955," appearing first in A Chosen Light (1967), and recently reprinted in Born in Brooklyn (1991):

After a reading where

you had been made

fun of, teased

and prodded (not the milkless Olympian bull of your poem),



30 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

you stood on the Old

Capitol steps, looking at the neat stars

and when I spoke

you put your arm

around me saying

"poet, poet!"

From anyone else

it would have been

ridiculous, but you made the gesture

(of manumission, almost)

seem so instinct

ively natural

that I am still

trying to live up to it,

learning to answer

to "poet, poet?" (Bom in Brooklyn 76)

Montague's tribute, written in Williams' "American line," stands as a testament

to Williams' life-long goal to emancipate ("manumission") poetry and poets from what he perceived to be outmoded, and specifically British, conventions.

That Montague is "still/ trying to live up to" Williams' appellation of "poet, poet!" is an elegiac, self-effacing gesture (a gesture strongly marked in the

final, questioning line: "poet, poet?") in which the master is elevated to the

level of Muse, but also one that identifies Williams as an arbiter of poetic value

and a bestower of laurels, a role Williams loved to play.2

Although a poem of humble praise, Montague also points to the ironic

position in which the generation of poets who followed Williams,

chronologically and philosophically, found themselves. And in Montague's case, Brooklyn-born, yet raised in County Tyrone, the relationship is especially

complex. The question arises as to what extent an Irish poet can remain the

follower of an ardently American poet like Williams, and at what juncture of

influence and independence, American-ness and Irish-ness, Montague's poetry

emerges.

Several readers have noted Williams' influence on John Montague's poetry in terms of local cadences and images, and a shared emphasis on natural

speech.3 Montague himself often mentions Williams in essays and interviews,

along with the next generation of American poets who exhibit what he calls a

"daring directness in pursuit of a language to accommodate modern experience." He claims the American works closer to experience and natural speech than his British contemporary: he can tackle subjects frontally without that horror of



John Montague and William Carlos Williams 31

naivety which forces the average Oxbridge talent into defensive literary reflexes. He is also, generally, much more trained in the tradition, even if it is

only to discard it; witness William Carlos Williams. This double seriousness

of craft and subject means that while American poets are not always

automatically good, they are almost always readable. Between the polarities of Eliot's purified line and William's "new measure" based on the American

vernacular, lies a variety of talents, a variety of solutions to the Words worthian

problem of natural language (The Figure in the Cave 189). In what reads as

a defense of American poetry, Montague reveals many of his own convictions

about what modern Irish poetry might be like. He looks for ways to balance the

colloquial and rhetorical, that "double seriousness of craft and subject," and

seeks his own solution to the "Wordsworthian problem of natural language." And if we were to place Montague's poetry somewhere between the "polarities" of Eliot and Williams, he would stand very near to Williams, for it is Williams

who offers Montague an approach to poetic construction; how to compose

poetry that is rooted in a local idiom, but speaks internationally. However, according to Adrian Frazier, this is precisely what Williams'

"American line" cannot offer Montague. Although he recognizes the influence

of Williams' shorter lines on Montague's poetry, Frazier claims such fragmented verse confers a sense of "pure being," that the rhetorical possibilities of

Williams' method are limited, and that the "loose syntax" employed by Williams is "incapable of any sort of statement" (Frazier 66). I would argue

quite the opposite is true. To position Williams so squarely within the Imagist movement is to ignore his numerous rhetorical, highly didactic poems, and

perhaps to take too literally Williams' anti-metaphysical pronouncement, "No

ideas but in things." More importantly, Williams' poetry is an extension of his

rhetoric rather than something operating in isolation, and is therefore inextricably bound to political, social, and historical aims.4 For Williams, casting off the restraint of traditional metrical norms (what Frazier says results in "loose

syntax") was equivalent to casting off the yoke of a lingering colonialism. It

is precisely the rhetorical implications of Williams' "American line,"

particularly the connection he made between poetic construction and national

identity, that Montague would find helpful in his search for a modern, yet

distinctly Irish voice. Williams' influence is apparent when we consider, first, how Montague's philosophy of poetic construction often mirrors that of

Williams', and second, though certainly not a separate issue, the formal

similarities discernible in their poetry. Williams repeatedly emphasized the importance of the American idiom,

just as Montague seeks to approximate the Irish idiom. But poetry is not

speech, and Montague and Williams are not simply holding microphones out to the world. As Williams insists, the poet composes language so that it may "constitute a revelation in the speech he uses," ("using common words in a

rare manner," Wagner 63) and without the skill of the poet, even the skill to




recognize potentially revelatory language, simple spoken utterances have little

poetic power on their own {Collected Poems 54). The peculiar characteristics

of speech in a given cultural context are only a starting point, resonances to

which the poet attunes his lines. For Williams, speech engenders poetry, which

constitutes a kind of familial relationship between spontaneous utterances

heard from back porches and the necessary discipline of making art. To be too

much the chronicler belies the craft of poetry all together, while to be too much

the artificer means losing the idiom, the crucial element that links poetry to a

particular place and time.

Montague shares Williams' philosophy on the relationship between speech and poetry. In his essay "In the Irish Grain" (most assuredly an echo of

Williams' In the American Grain) Montague praises those poets of the fifties

who "began to write without strain, a poetry that was indisputably Irish (in the sense that it was influenced by the country they came from, its climate, history, and linguistic peculiarities) but also modern" (The Figure in the Cave 124).

Montague provides a recipe for making modern Irish poetry: poetry without

strain, poetry that is "indisputably Irish," and therefore under pressure of local

"linguistic peculiarities," but poetry that is also "modern," or as he says later, "more experimental" so as to "confront the changes" in society. In "A Note on

Rhythm," Montague writes:

I believe very strongly that a poem appears with its own

rhythm.. . I think of a poem as a living thing, which one must

aid, not forceps-haul into birth. This sense of the organic nature of a poem goes with the conviction that rhythm and line

length should be based on living speech: I am sure that there was a specific relationship between language and the iambic

line which no longer holds true except as an example of how to harness an energy.

. . . There is an inhibiting traditionalism

in contemporary poetry this side of the Atlantic which saps inventiveness. It is only a habit of mind which makes us

expect a poem to march docile as a herd of sheep between the

fence of white margins. (The Figure in the Cave 48)

What Montague means, exactly, by "inhibiting traditionalism" is made clear

"In the Irish Grain," where he points to Heaney, Mahon, Longley, and Simmons,

who, he says, "share an epigrammatic neatness which shows the influence of

a limiting British mode" (The Figure in the Cave 125). As Montague implies, how one arranges words on a page, quite apart from explicit statement, says

something about one's national identity. To expect a poem to "march as docile

as a herd of sheep between the fence of white margins" is equivalent to the

"epigrammatic neatness which shows the influence of a limiting British mode."

For an Irish poet to adopt the harness of poetry that is still, at least schematically,




British, is to accept yet one more political harness as well. Montague adopts "the loose syntax" of William Carlos Williams, not to avoid rhetoric, not to

avoid making a "statement," but rather as a statement, a declaration of poetic

and national independence. The importance of the relationship Williams drew between poetic

construction and poetic identity, a point of view Montague shares, is one

reason Williams repeatedly voiced objections to the term "free verse." He

preferred the labels "natural rhythms of speech" or the "American idiom"

because they suggested not only an autonomy from traditional metrical patterns, but also functioned as declarations of national identity, an announcement to the

world that America had a language of its own.

Stephen Cushman, in William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure, argues convincingly that Williams' notion of poetry written to an

exact measure suggests much more than metrical precision. An "exact

measure" also implies poetry appropriate to a particular linguistic context. The

root word of measure is mete, meaning that which is appropriate, just, or fitting

(Cushman 2-3). Americans are not Elizabethans, Williams often reminded us,

and what was poetically appropriate for them is not fitting for us. Nor is "free

verse" a schematically or metaphorically acceptable term, at least as Williams

defined it, since it suggests a lack of technical precision, (for Williams, quite

literally "free of verse") and well as tropological precision. But Williams knew free verse does not necessarily lack rhythmic structure.

Whitman's lines, for instance, are highly cadenced, and no one would consider

the intensely wave-like action of "Song of Myself' as ungoverned, or arhythmic.

Furthermore, it is Whitman he largely credits for bringing the American idiom

into poetry, for employing the natural rhythms of speech Williams found so

crucial to his own art, for breaking out of the confines of Elizabethan measure.

But Whitman's lines are simply too long to adequately reflect the fragmented modern world.5 The free verse line took us in the right direction by breaking from traditional meters, but it did not complete the task of establishing a

uniquely modern American voice. Similarly, Montague objects to the

"epigrammatic neatness" of several of his contemporaries, insisting that a truly modern voice must be more experimental in order to "confront changes in

society."

In a "Note on Rhythm," Montague writes he would like to "use the page more, both for visual and musical effect, as French and American poets have

been doing for nearly a hundred years" (The Figure in the Cave 48). One

poem he cites as an accomplishment in this vein is his own "Life Class":

The infinite softness

& complexity of a body in repose. The hinge




of the ankle bone de

fines the flat space of a foot, its puckered

flesh & almost arch. (Selected Poems 85)

Montague says the stanzas shift from one margin to the other in order to create

a visual representation of the curves of the female body. The figure is traced

by the poet's eye, and subsequently by our own, revealing a geometry of sweeps and curves, arches, hollows, and hinges. We find a similarly static portrait of

the human form in Williams' "The Swaggering Gait":

Bareheaded

the hair blond in tight curls

the heavy and worn

blue sweater

buttoned tight under the cold sky

he walks

and lifts the butt of cigar he holds

to his pursing lips alone

-

save for the tilt

of his shoulders

the swing of his knees -

Even his paper

lunch bag in his other hand

sharing that one distinction. (Collected Poems 3)

In the absence of a traditional metrical norm, rhythmic tension is created in both

poems by employing three line stanzas, while the short, enjambed lines dole out a central image piece by piece. The visual exactness of "Life Class," an exactness intensified by the short lines, and stanzas that wander across the

page, are all reminiscent of Williams' style.6 It is an approach inspired by still

life painting, only here the figure is broken down into poetic elements and, as

Williams says, "reformed" (Wagner 60), so that in the act of composition a




figure is ground up in the imagination, then "reformed" in two senses: "put

together" as well as "amended."7

What is most intriguing about "Life Class" is how skillfully Montague combines imagistic and rhythmic qualities employed by Williams, and therefore

marks of modernity, with an investigation of the female body in mythological, historical, and social terms. One of Montague's most consistent themes is

woman as earth goddess, a reminder of pre-Christian, matriarchal Ireland.

The whole body a system of checks & balances -

those natural shapes

a sculptor celebrates,

sea-worn caves, pools,

boulders, tree-trunks -

or, at every hand's turn

a crop of temptation:

arm and thigh opening

on softer, more secret

areas, hair sprouting

crevices, odorous nooks

& crannies of love,

awaiting the impress of desire, . . .

But the earth goddess of matriarchal Ireland becomes temptress to the Christian "desert fathers" who see a

demon with inflamed

breasts, dangling tresses to drag man

down to hell's gaping

vaginal mouth.

Montague sees, in contrast, not an earth goddess or temptress, but "the model/

as simply human/ a mild housewife/earning pocket money/for husband and child." And to see her as a mild housewife "is to feel the dark/centuries peel

away." The modern line reveals a modern women. A new rhythmic structure

equals a new vision. But Montague is not obliged to abandon mythical




associations. She is still "the mother lode," an earth goddess brought up to date

by means of a new poetic scheme. It is how one sees the past in the present that

is important, an old subject reconfigured in a modern context.

Curiously, neither Williams' "The Swaggering Gait," nor Montague's "Life Class" are particularly reminiscent of the "natural rhythms of speech," that crucial element both poets strive for in order to evoke place and time;

rhythmic structures that identify a poet's nationality. To a great extent, both

Williams and Montague define their nationalities by inventing poetic structures

that are not Elizabethan; their poetry is American or Irish by default, by virtue

of not being British. Yet both admit that their predecessors brought their

respective national idioms into poetry. For Williams, it was Whitman, for

Montague, Austin Clark and Thomas Kinsella. Williams argued that Whitman

made the initial break, but that the task of creating a modern American poetry was incomplete. Similarly, Montague says Clark, "our freeist metrist," "showed more in his mastery of forgotten stanza forms, than in any creation of new

ones," and that Kinsella "discovered a new subject, but. . . not a new metric

to energize it" (The Figure in the Cave 190). Taking one's place for a subject is not enough if the language is not reinvented to accord with one's time.

Montague's poetry often looks and sounds like Williams' because both

poets work against the free verse line, if not directly against the "rhythms of

natural speech," by fragmenting line from line, simplifying images, creating what Eamon Grennan calls "grammatically impacted" verse (110). The longer free verse line helped capture the rhythmic qualities of a particular place, but

without further invention, without further experimentation, such poetry does not sufficiently address the needs of a particular time, the now in which a poet writes. The poetic task Montague sets for himself is to preserve his identity by preserving the past within a modern poetic structure; to acknowledge, as he

says too many Irish poets have not done, that Williams brought a "new music" to poetry.

But one might well argue that Montague avoids one yoke of poetic constraint (British) only to assume another (American), a dilemma Montague himself recognizes:

... I came back from that very varied world [America] to my little island and began to pick up the threads. I had been

working very well before I left, but the three years in America sort of threw me-So I had to establish-I had to reestablish contact with my earlier self, someone who had been very

fluent and very active but not in any kind of way that the locals in Ireland wanted to recognize.

. . .

I came back into the Ireland of the late 1950s, which was

not very liberated, and there was no point in trying to deploy a "Howl" technique yet. In any case, when one examines




"Howl," as you know yourself, Allen's tradition is the Biblical

prophet, and it's the long line of the Old Testament which he

deploys. It's not William Carlos Williams at all.

I had this enormous panorama of an emerging American

generation, but I had to re-enter the Irish situation .... So

I had to place myself inside that context, and that took me a

little while, and that came out as Poisoned Lands. . . . I had

glimpsed the panorama of what the Americans were going to

do, and was able to keep an interested eye on them, a

sympathetic eye, as theydeveloped or did not develop, while

using what I had learned for my own purposes. And this was

very helpful as a kind of counterbalance to any narrow sense

of the Irish tradition and indeed, to the English tradition, which seemed to be even narrower. (Arkin 243-35)

The geographical comparison (America as panoramic, Ireland as a "little

island") extends metaphorically to set the openness of American poetry against the poetic provincialism of Ireland. Yet it is clear Montague seeks not to

replace the latter with the former, but to find a point of mediation, a way to

counteract the narrow English influences with a dose of American poetic

spaciousness without losing Irish poetry to either one.

In fact, in order to avoid turning antidote into poison, Montague eventually comes to reject what he sees as American solipsism, an "elephantiasis of the

spirit" where each individual poet "demands that you enter totally into his world" (Arkin 236-37). One result of such narcissism is the exclusion of poetry that is not American, including the work of an certain Brooklyn-born Irishman,

just as Europeans largely ignored American poets, with Eliot a prominent exception.

Montague singles out the concept of "open form" as particularly troublesome

for American poetry, although he has obviously puts it to use in his own work.

However, he insists, "A poem must end somewhere, just as life ends. This

particular life ends somewhere, and it ends with death. Then of course you may go on to be reborn!" (Arkin 237). Ironically, it was Williams who was largely

responsible for the idea of poetry continually opening up, in both form and

content, a strategy designed to counter America's narrow, Puritanical history. In

In the American Grain, a work that is the seed ground for Paterson, Williams claims that "Americans have never recognized themselves. How can they? It is

impossible until someone invent the original terms. As long as they are content

to be called by somebody else's terms, they are incapable of being anything but our own dupes" (226). But the impulse to continually re-invent language and

history is one Montague treats warily. Williams left Paterson incomplete, (a

fragmentary sixth book was found among his papers after his death), despite decades of work. And as Montague suggests in the preface to The Rough Field,




"Although living in Berkeley introduced me to the debate on open-form from

Paterson, through Olson, to Duncan, I was equally drawn to rooted poets like

MacDiarmid ..." (vii). Whereas Williams insists that America has yet to invent a language capable of adequately expressing, or inventing a truly New World,

Montague figures Irish history and landscape as a "manuscript/ We had lost the

skill to read" (The Rough Field 35); therefore, recovery takes on as much

importance as invention. As Thomas D. Redshaw observes:

Williams' insistence on the native region produced the whole

imagination of Paterson (1946-1958), which is the long, open

genre and model that Montague's The Rough Field chiefly masters, without imitation and with less prolixity

. . .

Although many parallels may be aptly struck between the two

poems, what distinguishes The Rough Field is not solely the

matter of Tyrone. Rather, it lies in Montague's strict

employment of closed, often fixed and intransitive forms

within an open structure resembling Paterson's. (54)

Thus, while Montague finds a degree of liberation and the possibility of

defining a modern Irish poetic identity by means of Williams' schematic and

tropological methods, there is a limit, a boundary drawn ultimately by

Montague's sense of a recoverable Irish past which, though existing only as

"shards of a lost tradition," (The Rough Field 34) he refuses to abandon.8 Yet the need to be, finally, rooted in Irish history does not prohibit

Montague from drawing on Williams' "new music," or on the nationalistic

implications of poetic form Williams continually emphasized. For although The Rough Field begins with a "fixed and intransitive" sonnet, the theme, as

well as the poetic form, points to British imperialism:

Catching a bus at Victoria Station,

Symbol of Belfast in its iron bleakness, We ride through narrow huckster streets

(small lamps bright before the Sacred Heart

Bunting tagged for some religious feast) To where Cavehill and Divis, stern presences, Brood over a wilderness of cinemas and shops. Victorian red-brick villas, framed with aerials, Bushmill hoardings, Orange and Legion Halls. A fringe of trees affords some ease at last

From all this dour, despoiled inheritance, The shabby through-otherness of outskirts:

'God is Love', chalked on a grimy wall

Mocks a culture where constraint is all. (10)




British social and political "constraint" is duplicated schematically in a

pseudo-sonnet form, a kind of poetic imperialism. Following Montague's own

line of reasoning in "In the Irish Grain," to accept poetic constraint is tantamount to accepting yet another form of political constraint. But unlike

Williams, whose battle against British influence was waged solely at an

ideological level, and where the American Revolution continues only

figuratively, Montague confronts a political reality. To wholeheartedly adopt Williams' "open form" would mean losing contact with the facts of Irish

history, both past and present, to ignore the peculiar pressures of his environment, and ultimately annul what Montague sees as the "redemptive" possibilities of

poetry (Arkin 241). He must both physically and poetically "re-enter the Irish

situation," and although Paterson is indeed one of the principle models for The

Rough Field, and Montague's conflation of scheme and trope in the opening sonnet is consistent with Williams' poetic method, the historical and political differences that distinguish American and Irish experiences are immediately

made apparent.9 Williams once remarked: "Forcing twentieth-century America

into a sonnet -gosh, how I hate sonnets - is like putting a crab into a square box.

You've got to cut his legs off to make him fit" (Wagner 30). Paradoxically, and with bitterness, Montague follows Williams' dictum that poetry be shaped by the environment in which the poet finds himself, and thus christens his Irish

equivalent of Paterson, not with Williams' "open form" but with an Elizabethan sonnet.

The eighth section of The Rough Field, entitled "Patriotic Suite," also begins with a poem that evokes what Montague refers to earlier as a "bitter paradox," a "double impulse" to embrace and reject his nation's "suffering that became a

form of speech." In this case, the "form of speech" is traditional Irish music.

Again that note! A weaving

melancholy, like a bird crossing moorland;

pale ice on a corrie

opening inward, soundless harp

strings of rain:

the pathos of the last letter in the 1916 Room,

'Mother, I thank . . .'

a podgy landmine, Pearse's swordstick leading to a care

fully profiled picture. (64)

Here is the triadic line we find so prominent in Williams' poetry during and after Paterson.]0 The poem descends down and across the page. The line

breaks and subsequent spaces that open up demonstrate how Montague works




against conventional structures, including the uniform free verse line, in order

to create a new rhythmic structure within which old pains are addressed.

Breaking the word "harp-string," giving only the barest of introductions to the

letter before we skip to the "podgy landminV provides only glimpses of the

museum, just as in "Life Class" where the human figure is revealed part by part. The rhythmic movement of the lines work, visually and linguistically, in

concert with the "weaving melancholy" of the yellow bittern; a nauseous, ever

widening circle overhead. Montague comes back to the curlew in section ten

where he questions the value of a "native music/curlew echoing tin whistle/to

eye-swimming melancholy// is that our offering?" (69). There is irony, indeed a certain tension, between the "new music" of

Williams' line and the traditional music of Ireland that seems inadequate in its

answer to modern conditions, a continuation of the old bitterness. But it is a

bitterness Montague returns to, over and over again, a melancholy that is an

integral part of his poetic identity (an identity shaped by dual origins). For

Montague, Williams' "new music" does not help him avoid suffering by

offering an escape into "pure being." Rather, what Williams offers, and

Montague takes up, is a way to make that suffering his own, to re-enter the Irish

situation by measuring it anew.

NOTES

1 Sydney B. Poger makes a similar point in "Crane and Montague: 'The

Pattern History Weaves,' Eire-Ireland 16.4 (1981): 114-24, where he

compares Montague's The Rough Field and Hart Crane's The Bridge. "The initial problem each faced," Poger argues, "was how to find a

particular sense of place that would embody the national consciousness at a particular time ....

Although both poets are keenly aware of the past,

each wants his poem to be modern." Dillon Johnston, contrasting Montague with Denis Devlin, says "... Montague acknowledges a tension between

the universal, international, and local aspects in his poetry," whereas

Devlin "remains the international poet, his ideal incarnated but not localized"

(Irish Poetry After Joyce, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,

1985; 182). 2 In an interview with Walter Sutton ("A Visit with William Carlos Williams,"

in Interviews with William Carlos Williams, ed. Linda Welshimer Wagner, New York: New Directions, 1976, 68), Williams is asked about the

"younger generation of poets coming along" who seem to have opted for

his shorter lines. Williams recognizes his influence on writers like Denise

Levertov and Charles Olson, as well as others, but insists "that they don't

know exactly, metrically, what they're doing, most of them." He points,

specifically, to their use of the term "free verse," which he objects to,

coupled with his inability to get them to "adopt the term variable foot."




Although a new generation found his poetry worthy of emulation, they were not so willing to adopt his aggressive, often confusing, lexicon.

3 For brief references to Williams' influence on Montague, see particularly Terence Brown, "John Montague: Circling to Return," in Northern Voices:

Poets from Ulster (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975) 147-70; Eamon Grennan, "'Of So, and So, and So': Re-reading Some Details in

Montague," Irish University Review 19.1 (1989): 110-28; Brian John "'A

Slow Exactness': the Poetry of John Montague" Anglo-Welsh Review 72

(1982): 46-57; Harry Marten, "Memory Defying Cruelty: The Poetry of

John Montague" New England Review 2 (1982): 242-64; and K.

Weatherhead, "John Montague: Exiled from Order" Concerning Poetry 14.2 (1981): 97-113.

4 In fairness to Frazier, he does note that what Montague "retained" of

Williams' method is an "inseparable part of his charm," and that "Montague would not be what he is without his perpetual flourish of new verse forms

and rhythms, without his catlike precision of feet" (67). But Frazier

ignores the social, indeed rhetorical importance Montague assigns to the

practice of creating "new verse forms." Furthermore, to assume Williams'

poetic technique works "best when practised in a social and historical

vacuum" is to virtually eliminate him as central figure in twentieth century verse, to place Williams himself inside an historical vacuum.

5 The importance Williams placed on developing a new theoretical basis for

poetry, an underpinning he hoped would be equivalent to that found in

physics and mathematics, is suggested in his remarks concerning Whitman: "I don't know why I had that instinctive drive to get in touch with Whitman, but he was a passionate man, and the first great poem, "The Song of Myself,"

was more or less an adolescent poem, I think, because it was throwing away

any hold the classics had on him. He didn't know where to go, perhaps, but he didn't know anything about the English language as taught in England, and he wanted to be himself, and he couldn't contain himself any longer. So he just leapt off, and he was driven to find a way for himself, like the American pioneers, we'll say. He had to go. He didn't know where to go, and he wrote the way he felt. And it was not studied because he didn't

know how to study it" (Wagner 41-42). Whitman's poetry, in Williams'

estimation, comes from passion, the result of a kind of childish tantrum, and thus he, like the generation of poets after Williams who failed to use

precise terminology, didn't know, exactly, what he was doing. 6

Although the shifting margins of "Life Class" are not necessarily typical of much of Montague's work, it is a poem he singles out as experimental, yet he is quick to add he likes "lean as well as visually diverse poems" (The Figure in the Cave 49). Nevertheless, Montague shares Williams'

insistence on the importance of space: "And what about all that waste

paper, not reserved for silences but left fallow at the poem's edge? No




farmer would allow such poor ploughing. When the poet is aware of

space, then the poem achieves a Giacometti tension, surrounded by silence, but otherwise spacing is blankly automatic" (49). For Williams,

space takes the place of stress within, but especially between, poetic lines, or "rhythmic units" (Wagner 38).

Of Montague's "leaner" poems, one that immediately suggests Williams'

influence is "The Mother Cat":

The mother cat

opens her claws

like petals

bends her spine to expose her

battery of tits

where her young toothless snouts

screwed eyes

on which light cuffs mild

paternal blows

jostle & cry for position (Born in Brooklyn 19)

Compare to Williams' "Poem":

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset first the right forefoot

carefully then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of




the empty

flowerpot (Selected Poems 54)

7 In Paterson, this process of poetic fragmentation and recomposition is

metaphorically linked to water flowing over the Passaic Falls: "relieved of

their weight,/split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk/with the catastrophe of the

descent/floating unsupported/to hit the rocks: to thunder,/as if lightning had

struck" (8), after which the water recomposes itself, "a mass of detail/to

interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;/an assonance, a homologue/triple

piled/pulling the disparate elements together to clarify /and compress" (20). 8 This is not to suggest Williams ignores history. On the contrary, he claims

he was "conscious in everything" he wrote "of a usable past, a past as alive

in its day as every moment is today alive in me: Work therefore as different

from mine as one period can be different from another, but in spite of that

preserving between the two an identity upon which I feed" (Wagner 82). Yet Williams makes it eminently clear, especially in In the American

Grain that his sense of what constitutes American history, and therefore

what is usable, is much broader than more traditional versions that begin with Columbus. The section on Columbus follows an opening chapter on

Red Eric, and, to further disrupt the accepted narrative sequence, rather

than tell of Columbus' s discovery, Williams takes up the story of the return

voyage to Spain. The point I am making has to do with the differences between Montague's and Williams' respective "usable" pasts, and how

Montague marks those distinctions. 9 Robert F. Garratt ("John Montague and the Poetry of History," Irish

University Review 19.1 (1989): 91-102) points to Kavanagh's "The Great

Hunger" as a model for The Rough Field, but claims Kavanagh's long poem "may be too perfect a model," one Montague must distance himself from so

as to "enjoy the benefits of a poetic tradition, yet still cultivate his own

individuality." Interestingly, though without mentioning Paterson as a

possible alternative, Garratt notes that Montague reads "The Great Hunger" as ahistorical, and thus too "inhibiting" for a poet so concerned with "the

presence of the past," a way of "seeing that interprets the modern condition." 10 "The Descent," one of the numerous earlier poems Williams incorporated

into Paterson, is strikingly similar in both structure and tone:

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned.

Memory is a kind

of accomplishment, a sort of renewal

even

an initiation, since the spaces it opens up are new




places inhabited by hordes

heretofore unrealized, . . .

The descent

made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening:

which is a reversal

of despair.

For what we cannot accomplish, what

is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation

-

a descent follows, endless and indestructible. (Selected Poems 132-33)

WORKS CITED

Arkin, Stephen. "An Interview with John Montague: Deaths in the Summer." New England Review 2 (1982): 214-41.

Cushman, Stephen. William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure. New Haven: Yale UP, 1985.

Frazier, Adrian. "John Montague's Language of the Tribe." Canadian Journal

of Irish Studies 9 (1983): 57-75.

Kersnowski, Frank. John Montague. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1975.

Montague, John. The Figure in the Cave and Other Essays. New York:

Syracuse UP, 1989. ?. The Rough Field. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, 1989. ?. Born in Brooklyn. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1991. ?. Selected Poems. Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, 1982.

Redshaw, Thomas D. "Ri, as in Regional: Three Ulster Poets." Eire-Ireland

9.2 (1974): 41-64.

Wagner, Linda Welshimer, ed. Interviews with William Carlos Williams. New York: New Direction, 1976.

Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol.11. 1939-1962. Christopher G. MacGowan, ed. New York: New

Directions, 1988. ?. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956. ?. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963. ?. The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams. New Directions, 1968.



john montague and william carlos williams: nationalism and poetic construction

Documents