Abstract
This article examines the poetic theory and practice of William Carlos Williams, focusing on his concept of the “variable foot” and his rejection of traditional iambic meter in favor of a new measure rooted in American speech rhythms. Williams tried to break down the iambic line and invented a substitute he called measure, based on the natural and subtly varying rhythms of the spoken voice and the natural rhythms of breathing. The study traces Williams’s importance in creating a specifically American poetics, his experiments with form and meter, his concept of the triple-split line, and the critical responses to his variable foot from poets and scholars such as John Ciardi, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Rexroth, and Richard Eberhart.
Keywords: William Carlos Williams, variable foot, measure, American poetry, poetic form, rhythm, meter, imagism, Paterson, Pictures from Brueghel
Williams and American Poetic Form
William Carlos Williams rejected all form in poetry. He tried to break down the iambic line and invented a substitute what he called measure. Poetry he says, is based on measure which is something like “the natural and subtly varying rhythms of the spoken voice, based on the natural rhythms of breathing.” Indeed his importance lay in creating a specifically American poetics based on the rhythm and colorations of American speech, thought and experience. Williams gradually came to be acknowledged as the “Grand Old Man” of letters in the twentieth century American verse.
Rhythm, Rhyme, and Meter
It requires us to first understand form and meter before discussing Williams’s views on modern verse. The elements of poetic form are rhythm and rhyme. Rhyme becomes necessary in poetry as rhythm weakens. Meter makes a difference between prose and poetry. Verse differs from prose in the return of certain number of syllables that have a peculiar relation to one another as accented and unaccented, or as long and short.
Williams’s Concept of Measure
Williams seriously experimented with his concept of measure and matured its use in his later works. However, this measure, eventually “the variable foot” prefigures long before in a sentence of Kora in Hell: “A thing known passes out of the mind into the muscles.” Williams often said, structure, not subject matter, is the poet’s contact with reality. The only reality we can modify it. The only reality we can know is MEASURE.
The Variable Foot and the Triple-Split Line
Williams’s well known 1954 letter to Eberhart gives samples of “the variable foot.” Both men would hold that an American poet, employing the American idiom, will have American speech rhythms. But the whole notion of measure as “variable foot” continues to be technically elusive. Williams’s sense of the dependence of measure on the individual’s psycho-physical nature gives a typographical movement to his later poems. His poems in the triple-split line have been an exciting experience. The three parts of the line, if not measurably the same length, feel equal.
Williams’s Poetic Structure
Williams’s conception of a poem was, therefore, based on theme and the structure: the dream and the reality. The subjective contents of the poem on the one hand and on the other the structure, the physical poem itself as a small machine constructed of words and the spaces between them. Williams says that we seldom think of poetic structure as we do of engineering: a field of action worthy of a masculine attack where invention is not only possible but constitutes one of the most moving elements of our world.
Works Cited
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- Ciardy, John. “Thing is the Form”. Nation, April 24, 1954, 368. Critical Heritage. Ed. Charles Doyle, London: Routledge, 1980.
- Doyle, Charles Ed. Introduction. Critical Heritage, 1-47.
- Eberhart, Richard. “The Speaking Voice and Direct Wisdom”. Saturday Review, Feb 18, 1956, 49.
- Goodman, Paul. “Between the Flash and The Thunder Stroke”. Poetry, Vol. LXXXVI (1956). 366-70.
- Kenner, Hugh. Spectrum 3 3 (1959): 131-57.
- Rexroth, Kenneth. “A poet Sums up”. New York Times Book Review Month 28, 1954. The Critical Heritage 275-77.
- Williams, Carlos William. The Critical Heritage. Ed. Charles Doyle, London: Routledge, 1980.
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- ---. “Some Hints Towards the Enjoyment of Modern Verse”. Contemporary Poetry. Ed. T. Weiss and Rerve Wligs. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.
- ---. Selected Essays. New York, 1954.
- ---. Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Norfolk Conn, 1962.