Abstract
Despite receiving the Loines Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Book One, Williams had difficulty in moving to Paterson II,1 apparently at one time stopping work on it for many months. He then planned to use as an ‘interlude’ between the two ‘books’ the poetess’s letter which now closes II. He considered centring it on the Paterson strike, while in another draft it is subheaded ‘summer’ — with a parenthesis: ‘(Pleasure. Happy, happy, happy!)’. In the same set of drafts (Yale, 185) he insists in one place that ‘The Whole Poem is / ONE / … ’ describing it in another as a somewhat long episodic poem’. Episodic it is, as he himself came to recognize, but paradoxically this is its ‘single effect’, the rendering of flux.
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Notes
Edgar F. Racey, ‘Pound and Williams: The Poet as Renewer’, Bucknell Review vol. xi (March 1963) pp. 21–30.
Robert Lowell, Nation (19 June 1948) p. 692.
Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1896 ). This was the specific edition Pound recommended to Williams.
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955 ) p. 215.
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© 1982 Charles Doyle
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Doyle, C. (1982). Paterson II . In: William Carlos Williams and the American Poem. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16839-2_9
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