One of the De Goncourts once said that nothing in the world hears as many silly things said as a picture in a museum. Below, William Carlos Williams expresses a similar sentiment, but in relation to poetry, stating that he cares little for the intellectual’s credentials. He writes to Richard Lane Latimer, his editor, hoping to find a reader receptive to his language, a change from the public bent on evaluating his turns of technique.
February 25 1935
Dear Latimer: Certainly, I’d like to have a book of verse by the Alcestis Press. I haven’t a damned thing to send you for #3—not even a line of a poem. Everything has been snatched out of my hands the moment it’s written. I am even starting to write them to order now. If I can find anything in the air for you during the next week or so—but that’s no promise. How big a book do you want? Tell me again. And when do you want it?
This is what I’d say to our academic critics, if I were asked:
… You are thinking of something very dead and likely to be smelly very soon—one of the first things that is done at an autopsy is to measure and weigh the corpse. But the danger to the difficult present art of verse-making in our language which you gentlemen are likely to fabricate is great, unless you grow more careful with your teaching. You will be the losers too, not the inventive mind of some possible poet.
All right, what then do I want you to do? I want you to DISCOVER not necessarily in my verse, but what mine may do, what the new measures are to be. I want you to reject the slag of what I write and pull out the NEW, that which relates to the American language and modern times—and give it the benefit of your unquestioned erudition and training. Do as critics what the artist cannot do, hasn’t time for in the performance of his task of perception of truth piecemeal—you to join it into a grammar if you will.
It makes me weary for some instructor at Columbia to come up to me after a reading and ask me why I put a certain verse in the form in which I put it. How the hell am I going to answer him and why should I if I could? Let him rather look into my verse to discover where the formal occasion lies—and find perhaps a lead for his deductions. I know he is important, I know what my difficulties are—but I’ll be damned if I have the onus of proof put on me.
Very well, you may reject me and all I do, place me far down your table of values. That’s perfectly all right, you do it at your own peril and that is your business—but if you are interested in fertilizing me as a producing poet you won’t classify me lightly—
Sincerely,
W. C. Williams
From The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Edited by John C. Thirlwall. New York: New Directions, 1984. pp. 152-153.
FURTHER READING
Latimer had a strange and troubled history.
UPenn’s archive of Williams reading aloud.