Full Description
For many readers William Carlos Williams is the poet of red wheelbarrows, purplish bushes struggling into spring, enduring pink locusts, and Christmas greens. For Dr. Cappucci, he is the ambitious poet of Paterson. Williams grows into that book, that longed-for climax to a life's work, that always-unfinished vision that year by year recedes before him, by finding himself in Northern New Jersey in 1913, a privileged observer of the political event of the year: the Paterson silk mill strike. For many readers William Carlos Williams is the poet of red wheelbarrows, purplish bushes struggling into spring, enduring pink locusts, and Christmas greens. For Paul Cappucci, he is the ambitious poet of Paterson. Cappucci's Dr. Paterson is personified so that he can be known and can know himself. Williams grows into that book, that longed-for climax to a life's work, that always-unfinished vision that year by year recedes before him, by finding himself in Northern New Jersey in 1913. In this annus mirabilis, Williams became a husband, an expectant father, a householder, an experienced physician, and a privileged observer of the political event of the year: the Paterson silk mill strike. What that strike did for Williams was to anchor his attention to home ground and then supply a nearby New York artistic community who found this home significant. For Williams the strike melded radicals, workers, and artists into lifework he could claim: to mirror this modernity, this vilest swill hole in Christendom, through his poems. After the Paterson silk mill strike William Carlos Williams finally saw how he could also fuse the disparate parts of himself. He could be a particular kind of poet, partially modeled by Walt Whitman, who would discard the tired old forms and sounds of traditional British poetry in order to sound his barbaric yawp over the roofs of his place: Paterson. He had the image of this encircling flight by the end of the year and published it in "The Wanderer", as Cappucci shows us here.
Contents
PREFACE...ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...iv INTRODUCTION...1 CHAPTER 1: THE EARLY LIFE AND POETRY OF DR. WILLIAMS...13 CHAPTER 2: THE "DUSTY FIGHT" AND WILLIAMS' "THE WANDERER"...33 CHAPTER 3: WILLIAMS' CONTACT WITH AMERICA (1914-1925)...75 CHAPTER 4: "SOUNDING OUT" THE DEPTHS OF PATERSON...107 CHAPTER 5: WEAVING TOGETHER THE THREADS OF PATERSON...143 CONCLUSION...189 WORKS CITED...193 INDEX...203
