Having established my grounds for studying epiphanies and transcendent experience in Williams’ poetry, I now step back and describe these phenomena as they develop
organically in Williams’ own work. Kora in Hell is a key text for systematizing this aspect of Williams’ work, as it introduces and explains his core concepts of imagination, perception, inner perfections, newness, and dance. Also, Williams himself claims that he returned to this text most often throughout his life because it was the most accurate expression of his
approach to art. Just as I draw on T. S. Eliot’s prose writings to interpret Four Quartets, I similarly turn to Williams’ prosaic text Kora in Hell as the basis for my reading of his poetry.
In the Prologue to Kora in Hell, published in 1918, William Carlos Williams reflects extensively on the nature of imagination. He frames the prologue with an anecdote about his mother’s poor memory when she once traveled abroad. The story catalogues a series of observations about her innocently atomistic way of seeing the world, and specifically of navigating a new city; though she ought to turn right, she naively turns left and is perpetually lost from turn to turn. Though one man cheats her in one moment, the experience fails to inform her “judgment of the next man,” and she meets each new man free from the lens of pre-judice. Williams juxtaposes these stories with the tale of a boll weevil in a Carl Sandburg poem: though placed in water, hot ashes, or sand, the boll weevil and Williams’ mother sing the refrain “That’ll be ma HOME!” In contrast to the initial presentation of her perpetual
lostness, Williams suggests that his mother is actually at home in each moment. Because things are always new for her, there is a natural intimacy that association precludes: for Williams’ mother, each moment is isolated from others like it, allowing her engage in
experience that is free from association; each thing is indeed new. And because each moment is independent from the next, the epiphany must be an experience of things, not events, for an event presupposes continuous narratival context. In concluding the vignette of his mother, the poet offers a manifesto for the imagination:
Thus, seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception, my mother loses her bearings or associates with some
disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining quality. She is a despoiled, molted castaway but by this power she still breaks life between her fingers.208
With this opening, Williams accomplishes several things. First, he offers a model of what he calls imagination, and even this early in his writing, he avoids offering a definition or an explicit argument. Instead, he gives us a collection of fragments that, together, suggest what imagination is. Second, he launches an implicit argument against association as a mode for interpreting the world. Third, he introduces the notion of brokenness, which is a
significant theme later in the prologue. I aim to systematize the elements of imagination while respecting the poet’s aversion to categorization and deterministic definitions. The terms I use are taken from Williams’ own vocabulary, and I use his language to interpret his poetry.
William’s view of imagination in Kora in Hell and a few mid-career poems and prose illustrate a process he explores throughout his career—one which begins with imagination
and culminates in what I call a secular epiphany. For Williams this moment of illumination and delight occurs when perception and language are cleared of association, so that the imagination is activated, enabling individual people, parts, and things to be brought into dance, with a concurrent experience of both immediacy and universality. In this journey, Williams will model and discuss how to engage with the ordinary world of lived experience, and how to reach—not beyond—but into it in order to experience transcendence through totality.
For Williams, interpretation is precisely what keeps an individual from seeing things as they are, as it assumes that some layer of the thing needs to be removed or seen past, or that the thing as it appears is not truly itself and needs to be associated with other things in order to be comprehended. This triangulation leads to banality as the thing slowly disappears from sight, buried beneath layers of interpretation. Williams believes that such association is actually a form of un-seeing and is part of the viewer; thus, banality is not a function of the thing, but of the viewer. The first step in Williams’ poetic process is to clear the subject’s perceptive horizon; language must likewise undergo a reduction as symbolism, association, and external metaphors are removed, leaving bare idiom and ordinary language at the poet’s disposal.