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The Verse Line in Williams

1. IN THE 1959 INTERVIEWS WITH EDITH HEAL, William Carlos Williams talks of his Complete Collected Poems in 1938 as providing him with "the whole picture," a chance to appraise all he "had gone through technically to learn about the making of a poem" Then he recounts learning to organize a poem into lines: The greatest problem was that I didn't know how to divide a poem into what perhaps my lyrical sense wanted. Free verse was not the answer. From the beginning I knew that the American language must shape the pattern; later I rejected the word language and spoke of the American idiom--this was a better word than language, less academic, more identified with speech. (I Wanted 64-65) This kind of statement draws skeptical comments from critics (for example, Cushman 81-83, 99, and Perloff 160). In point of fact, Williams spoke to the problem of lineation in a letter to James Laughlin in 1939. When Laughlin related how his professors at Harvard had told the young editor not to "mix auditory and visual standards in poetry," Williams was contemptuous. "What they, the formulators of that particular question do not know," Williams snapped, "is that an auditory quality, a NEW auditory quality, underlies and determines the visual quality which they object to" (Williams and Laughlin 49). Williams had argued for this new auditory quality throughout the 1930s and proposed to formalize it--what he refers to above as "the pattern" in a new verse line. "The new verse is a new time;" he insisted in 1931, a time manifest in and measured by this line. Not a forced, metric time but something invented, "a new time that catches thought as it lags and swings up into the attention" (Selected Letters 136). That verse line, the basis of a new poetic form, was to be discovered in--invented from--the American vernacular. (1) Williams's attempts at "measuring" the vernacular line have largely been dismissed; the sound and shape of his poems remain a topic of contention. (2) No doubt visual and aural elements are both at play, and any discussion of Williams's verse line needs to consider their interlinking complexities. The issue here is twofold. First, if what guides Williams is primarily an "auditory quality" found in American speech, then exactly in what way are his lines modeled on speech? Second, and more difficult to establish, if Williams's prosody is speech-based, how might those lines express, as he insisted, musical time and so be the basis of what he notoriously called a "new measure"? In the following I'll argue that Williams's verse line functions as a prosodic device, indicative of several aural factors, chiefly intonation, pace, and rhythm, and that it is fashioned with regard to its impact on the total poem--that is, subordinate to the poem as a whole--rather than functioning simply as a visual or rhythmic unit (such as an iambic pentameter line). (3) Further, I'll demonstrate in what ways Williams's prosody is in fact speech-based and show, by listening to Williams, how line breaks give clear evidence of his prosodic practice--breaks best explained by use of syntax, intonation, and pace. 2. In December 1931, Williams composed a letter to Kay Boyle, intended as the opening declaration for a new incarnation of Contact (Mariani 328-29). His premise was, bluntly, "There is no workable poetic form extant among us today" (Selected Letters 129). He writes of listening to "speech in my own environment" for a prosodic model which he'd develop into a form. "The form of poetry," he insists, "is that of language" (4) Because the form of poetry is to be found in characteristics of the spoken language, Williams will consequently search the vernacular for formal characteristics and argue that Greek prosody emerges from the Greek language and English prosody from English. It follows that, because American is distinct from British speech--shaped by a relationship to place, an argument central to In the American Grain (1925) (5)--American poetry should be distinguished by its development from vernacular, hence his later insistence on "intrinsic form" (Collected II, 54). …