PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

The turn of the view
toward poetic technique

Of recent years I have become more and more aware of a basic
change that has come over our conception of the way in which
literature our poems must be made. I say must be made because it
is part of our present situation in the world that when we perceive
an alternative to our actions which enlarges the field which they
occupy we feel inevitably impelled to give them the head to go where
they are called. We cannot conceive of a world any more without
the miracles which astronomy and physics have presented to us. And
in aesthetics, the construction of a poem, we shall find ourselves
equally bound.

There are leads, which when we become aware of them, which
the
point the way to approaching change, undoubtedly unwelcome, that
have been latent for centuries. The tendency of the race is to
resist change, violently. At the same time the new presses to be
recognized. Which is the most conservative? That which drives
us to keep the old or that which seeks a place for us in some slowly
or at times as in the present, rapidly evolving? Certain it
is that we have no voice in the matter if we want to survive; we
cannot refuse to go forward when the opportunity offers itself,
Not to do so is the end of us.

Open to us is only a choice, in aesthetic matters, as to what
we prefer: the perfection of a Homeric line (which, by the way
we cannot any longer properly pronounce) or, say, a stanza from one
of Villon's ballads. But that is not at all a choice since all men

2.

are agreed that each in its own category is perfection. But when the availability for human expression is broached, the structure of the poet's line itself enters the field. This is true whether we are speaking of the choice of words to be employed. That is where aesthetics is mated with physics, to broaden and加深 the view. What word will you employ to bring more meaning to your chosen text? This is the question.

What word will you employ to bring more meaning to your chosen text? That is the question which must open more avenues to your mind or fail to interest it.

The mind always tries to break out of confinement. It has tried every sort of interest which presents itself, even to a flight to the moon. But the only thing which will finally interest it must be its own intrinsic nature. In itself it must find devices which will permit it to survive - physical transportation to another planet will not help. For it will still be the same mind which has not been by that relieved.

But in the arts, the art of the poem, are resources which when we become aware of their existence make it possible for us to liberate ourselves. Or so I believe and # think, with reason # # # I hope, can be made plain to anyone who will read. We are no longer children; it is in the mind not on the moon we must find our relief.

Striking to the one point of view, another point of view, and then jumping for a distance and a half to the next, one has to pass through a series of changes in the construction of this which is itself one of the chief sources of difficulty. The construction of this has been done in order to make the monotony of the line's prosody less distinct.

3.

The first thing you learn when you begin to learn anything
about this earth is that you are eternally barred
save for the report of your senses from knowing anything about
it. Measure serves for us as the key: we can measure between
objects, therefore, we know that they exist. Poetry began with
measure, it began with the dance whose divisions we have all but
forgotten are still known as measures. Measures they were and we
still speak of their minuter elements as feet.

If the measure by which the poem is to be recognized has
at present been lost, it is only lost # in the confusion #/our
lives. We don't, any more, know how to measure the lines and
therefore have convinced ourselves that they can't be measured.

So what can we do but retreat to some "standard" which we
have known in the past and say to ourselves, Beyond this standard
you shall not go! That we do not know how to go beyond this
standard practice or may not want to go beyond for conservative
reasons is humanly possible. Whole reaches of knowledge with
the forms which attach to them, the academies and schools which/
frozen into complex pattern impress our minds and our emotions
until we defend them even with our lives, fill the field.

We have our measures of English verse from Beowulf to the
present # and all the polite prejudices that stem from them
but - # in spite of their beauty none # that # they have #
offer a release from our dilemma. # A new
measur or way of measuring the line is beyond our thoughts.

4.

The first thing that was necessary before we could look beyond
# the stalemate which had been created by the classic measure
of the break was to break it apart. That would be under our ordinary
understanding of the term, to destroy it. That was accomplished, I
am speaking of the classically accepted measure, by Walt Whitman.
That he had no clear conception of what he had done is beside the
point. A break had been made. He apparently thought that # the break
was toward some # objective known as "freedom" ## and not, as was
actually the case, toward a more ample ## measure. ###

If the measurement itself is confined, every dimension of
the verse and all implications touching it suffer confinement and
it and
generate pressures within our lives which will blow us apart. It
is no matter that we are dealing with a comparatively unnoticed part
of the field of our experience, the
field of poetics, the result to our minds will be drastic. You cannot
break through old customs, in verse or social organization,
without drastically changing the whole concept and
also the structure of our lives all along the line.

That it is merely and magnificently the birth of a new measure
supplanting the old measure - is something we hardly hoped to dare.

about
That the realization of what is toward can come in any of the
fields of human interest, we must be ready to accept. It may seem
presumptive to state that such an apparently minor activity as
a movement in verse construction could be an indication of Einstein'
discoveries in the relativity of our concepts of our measurements
is drastic enough
of physical matter/but such are the facts.

5.

Witlessly but taking his cue out of the air Whitman was
in his so called free verse only initiating a new measure. It is to
poetic
the line, the ancient/line, that we have to look for what is to
come next. The unit of which the line has in the past been construc-
ted no longer in our minds/permitted to exist. That is the thing
which makes poems as they still continue to be written #&#314;&#314;&#314;&#314;
obsolete. A new measure has supplanted the old!

That the foot can no longer be measured it was
formerly but only relatively, makes a basic alteration necessary in
pur plans for it. But measure we must have as long as we are
complexities of
impelled to know/the world about our ears. The verse I can envisage,
a measure infinately truer and more subtle than that of the past,
 comes much closer in its construction to modern concepts of reality.

William Carlos Williams
9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, N.J.