Vs.

by WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

When I say, as I always do when offered the opportunity, as I said
the night before last at New York University where I had been invited to
speak, when I say that the form of the verse is, as it ages, malignant
and should be destroyed periodically; in saying this I am greeted by the
most passionate attacks from those who face me. Not that there do not at
the same time appear friends and defenders — but even they hesitate at the
word "destroy."

No, they say, he doesn't mean destroy (I myself am not at that moment consulted), he means merely that the modern must grow out of the past and so leave it behind —that the past in fact destroys itself.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

What I say is, that we must destroy the past before stepping over the threshold of a new day. And then others of my defenders say, Dr. Williams is in the main quite correct in his tenets, but there is one aberration which he seems to share, as it happens, with Plato! and, was it Leonardo? — distinguished company! He seems to want to believe that somehow in the form of the verse, the actual form itself, social and philosophic fixations of the past are lodged and from it cannot be wrenched unless the form, as a form, is itself smashed. There, of course, he is going too far.

But, I insist, that that is precisely where I stand and it is the position
from which I will not be moved.

But, begins another, when Dr. Williams says that the sonnet must be destroyed,
surely he can't mean that. The sonnet is a mere matter of counting, of numbers.

-3-

dare not go. Certainly we may accept and use them as secondary choices,
but finally we must go beyond them as Ulysses penetrated finally even to
Hades (that is the past of his race) before he could know the most that
could be known, finally, in his own day.

Before we can begin to invent and be, the forms, the formal conca-
tenations, the artificial galaxies, the taboos which frighten or secure us,
must be seized and wrenched from the walls of our thoughts and broken apart
in our hands. They are meaningless today as forms for us, we only know them
as a matter of ancient counting. We acknowledge that there is nothing in
them for us as inventions. Then why do we want to make use of them except
as objects of superstitious veneration — or worse than that, as playthings
and substitutes? Use them, why not? But if they have not been jerked first
from their nails above us we are our own dupes.

Look! the fixed overall quality of all poems of the past was a plainly
understandable counting. The lines were measured and in general evenly arr-
anged — to reveal a similar orderliness of thought and behavior in the
general pattern of their day. Such measures (notice the word) were synony-
mous with a society, uniform, and made up of easily measurable integers,
racial and philosophic. The arts were of that world, aristocratic and, as
time went on, Christian. Thus there was a correlation between the world as
it stood politically and philosophically and the form of the poem that
represented it — noticeably so in Dante's terza rima.

But how, today, shall a Christian address a sonnet, in form, to a Jew
or a Negro? It might have an ironic meaning but little more than that. Or
he might use it to induct a Jew or a Negro into his own culture — his