How to Describe the Verse-Prose Unit of Spring and All

Spring and All does not exactly tell you how to read it, at least not at first. Chapter

headings are out of sequence, in roman and Arabic numerals, printed upside down. At the beginning of this work, the poet is not your friend. He is barking directions, shouting in all caps, making pointless cross-references. On the basis of the first ten pages or so, one might say that, if the work is a prosimetrum, then the basic “unit” of the book is five or six pages of prose containing as many false starts and out-of- sequence chapter headings, followed by two heavily enjambed but syntactically regular verse poems, follow by more of the same prose shenanigans. Williams’s

107 deliberately haphazard numbering scheme shapes from the beginning our experience of the work.

But the playful chapter headings in the prose peter out after the first ten

pages.36 Indeed there are no headings for any of the prose after poems III and IV (186– 87). The work then settles in to a fairly regular rhythm: about two and a half pages of prose (in 20 to 30 short paragraphs) followed by either two or four verse poems (or two poems followed by two or three pages of prose). Williams’s reasons for the haphazard headings seem clear enough: it was yet another way to distinguish his treatment of prose from his treatment of verse. As Williams recalls in I Wanted to

Write a Poem:

[Spring and All] consists of poems interspersed with prose, the same idea as IMPROVISATIONS. It was written when all the world was going crazy about typographical form and is really a travesty on the idea. Chapter headings are printed upside down on purpose, the chapters are numbered all out of order, sometimes with a Roman numeral, sometimes with an Arabic, anything that came in handy. The prose is a mixture of philosophy and nonsense. It made sense to me, at least to my disturbed mind—because it was disturbed at that time—but I doubt if it made any sense to anyone else. But the poems were kept pure—no typographical tricks when they appear—set off from the prose. They

36 _{The roman numeral headings for the poems are sequential (the omission of VII before “The rose is} obsolete” at 195 is an omission the editors chose not to correct; see 502). The prose headings are, in order: [title page]; “CHAPTER 19” (178); “CHAPTER XIII” (180; printed upside down); “CHAPTER VI” (181); “CHAPTER 2” (182); “CHAPTER XIX” (182); “THE TRADITIONALISTS OF

PLAGIARISM” (182; sub-heading, printed smaller than chapter headings); Poem “I” (183), Poem “II” (184); “CHAPTER I” followed immediately by the subheading “SAMUEL BUTLER” in smaller type (185). Following this, there are no new prose headings for the rest of the work.

108 are numbered consistently; none had titles though they were to have titles later when they were reprinted in Collected Poems. (IWW, 36–37)

Here as elsewhere, Williams insists that the poems form the core of the work, and the prose is merely contrastive, a way to underscore the relative importance of the poetic texts. Perhaps Williams simply grew tired of the conceit, having sufficiently

lampooned typographical tricks and made clear that they would not be allowed in the verse sections. In any case, the chaotic opening suggests that the prose of Spring and

All is subject to some sort of disorder—either willful or by neglect—whereas some

additional care has been taken to arrange the poems in an orderly fashion. In insisting that the poems remain a gimmick-free zone, Williams continues the anti-rhetorical line of American poetry inaugurated with Whitman’s claim to have “succeeded at last” in “leaving out all the ‘stock’ poetical touches” from Leaves of Grass.37

(Here Whitman utilizes the negative valences of “to leave” and “touch” that often go unremarked. Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for the all-encompassing poetic project to include—to leave in—all the ornamental phrases, lest a catalogue of all the poet’s “touches” remain incomplete?) But Whitman’s claim is quite specific—that leaving out such phrases has not come naturally, but is difficult poetic labor—and this places him, perhaps surprisingly, at the beginning of a tradition that prizes the self-restraint of the poet. Whitman’s marriage of a realist aesthetic that is all-encompassing in content

37

In a diary entry included in Specimen Days. “Through Eight Years” lists in a short paragraph several major events in Whitman’s life between 1848 and 1855, from the end of his time at the Brooklyn Daily

Eagle through the publication of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Immediately after the line about

poetical touches, he closes the entry with its date of composition “I am now (1856–7) passing through my 37th year.” This line recalls Whitman’s reference to his age in the opening of “Song of Myself,” though interestingly, he had removed the reference to his age after 1855 (where it appeared in a later section) and would not reinsert it until 1881. Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), 20.

109 to a restrained ideal of verse that refuses rhetorical “touches” (in the service of the same idea of realism and immediacy), is just the tradition that Williams would take up (and also Riding and Stein, in their divergent ways).

The opening chaos—the orchestral tune-up—at the outset of Spring and All resembles something like Whitman’s 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass: a work of art in its own right to be sure, but the purpose is to create contrast rather than continuity with what follows. Whitman did not exactly choose boring prose for the 1855 preface, but the two-column format doubly presents the squared-off, fully-justified format that he would take leave of in the free verse poems that followed (and, in later editions, with language lifted verbatim from the preface but inserted into poems).38 Whitman’s prose preface, radical itself, establishes a stable norm of “prose” against which the verse of

Leaves of Grass is perceived as verse.39 The hyperactive headings and typographic innovations of the opening prose passages of Spring and All serve much the same purpose. In order to keep the poems “pure,” as he says was his intention, the prose must be impure, and radically so.

Many of the most memorable passages from Spring and All occur in this opening sequence, and none is more notorious that the stated intention that

“Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east)

sparing none” (178). This passage has become something of a red herring for many

38 _{“By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” most famously.} 39

In many cases the language is not remarkably different, but the concept of a line has shifted from column-shaped containers to a mere annoyance. Whitman’s prose block conforms to typographical conventions of the page, where his verse line is conceptual, regularly extending beyond even the generous margin of the page in the large trim size of the 1855 edition.

110 readers; its bombast masks several more subtle echoes. It is true that this imagined destruction of western civilization takes aim at the mandarin attitudes of Pound and Eliot.40 But it is a gross oversimplification to say that Williams is simply

imaginatively lashing out against the continental and expatriate circles from which he would remain estranged nearly his entire career. For starters, this revenge fantasy is completely reciprocal: “First we shall kill them and then they, us” (179). Second, the reversed order of killing here suggests that he also has an eye on a certain playful approach to time. Even at its most bloody and dramatic, Williams’s opening is toying with ideas of sequence, pacing, and disrupting what is presumed to be the normal flow of time from instant to instant. In wishing for the destruction of “the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity” (179), Williams suggests that it really doesn’t matter who kills whom first: it’s all just a boring repetition anyway, unless something truly new intervenes.

The genocidal vision sketched out here has not aged well, and it is difficult to read this (especially aloud) without a shudder and a groan. But the vision of total violence was never really the point. Most readers, I think, might recognize this thought

40 _{There is an echo here of the one fully negative moment in Whitman’s 1855 preface. In almost every} case, negative attitudes and actions are accepted and encompassed by the poet. See the huge catalog of vices all “duly realized and returned” at pp. 631–32 in Michael Moon’s Norton Critical Edition of

Leaves of Grass. The one aspect of America that Whitman does not recuperate in this way is organized

religion: “There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait a while . . . perhaps a generation or two . . dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place . . . the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. The new order shall arise and they shall be priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest” (634). Williams follows Whitman here in imagining the passing of the era of cultural priests such as Eliot. Of course, this did not come to pass, and the

publication of “The Waste Land,” to which many have theorized that the opening of Spring and All is responding, a blow that Williams took famously hard: “I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I’m sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of the new art form itself- rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. I knew that in certain ways I was defeated”

111 experiment from Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, where the philosopher advances a theory that, in order to account for change in time and because all change must have a cause, God is supposed to destroy and recreate the world from instant to instant.41 This has been referred to as the “cinematographic theory of motion as a succession of static objects . . . a conception that precludes events as such.”42

Williams follows this progression to a T: after the complete destruction of all human life,

everything up to the previous moment is spontaneously recreated exactly as before: Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlaid, remained hidden.

It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequence of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God!

41

In the third meditation. This passage also echoes Poe’s “The Power of Words,” in which the post- apocalyptic angel Agathos advances a theory of infinite creation out of even the smallest linguistic utterance. See Poe, Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1996), 822–25. Agathos argues “no thought can perish, so no act is not without infinite result” and that words, as “impulses on the air,” have physical consequences that become quite significant once far enough along the infinite chain of results (823, 825). As he contemplates the “final overthrow of the earth” with his friend Oinos, Agathos becomes saddened by the sight of a beautiful green star that was born of “a few passionate sentences” he spoke to his lover three centuries earlier, finally realizing the truth of his impassioned statement upon seeing its physical manifestation in the flowers and volcanoes of the star’s surface (825). Poe also advances a theory of “retrogradation”—the “faculty of referring at all epochs,

all effects to all causes—by which science might trace the chain of cause and effect far enough back to

discover the original impulse that triggered the existence of any one among the “numberless comets” (Poe’s example, 824).

42 _{See Thomas M. Lennon, writing specifically about motion in time with reference to Decartes, Hume,} and Bergson: Thomas M. Lennon, “Hume’s Conditions for Causation: Further to Gray and Imlay,”

112 Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by. A perfect plagiarism results. Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived. (181)

This secret, yet “perfect plagiarism” from instant to instant is a kind of anti-repetition: wiping away all precedents so that “everything that is and is new.” It is a repetition forward, rather than a circling back; the echo precedes the (imaginative) event that caused it. Descartes found his method of radical doubt to be necessary because he otherwise could not shake old habits of mind. Williams engages in something similar as a way of re-writing the modernist rhetoric of novelty to suit his own purposes, at once comically overblown and sarcastically de-fanged. The real punchline in this passage is buried: the “gradual” taking place of the miraculous miracle and the “orderly sequence” of evolution’s recapitulation. The destruction of the world may have taken a page or so, and its recreation over a billion years a paragraph, but Williams wants to insist that the process has been gradual and orderly. The

incongruous pacing creates a sense of readerly whiplash: while astronomical time is dashed off in a two-sentence paragraph, this whole process brings us up to the same “now” that would have resulted without the entire destruction and recreation of the world. We have gone everywhere and nowhere in a page, but gradually and in an orderly manner!43

43 _{The jolting mismatch in the scale of the thing repeated recalls the opening of the penultimate chapter} of Thoreau’s Walden, in which he provides this economical account of the second year he spent by the

113 This sort of counterpoint between speed and scale on one end and pace or attention on the other is one of the most prominent features of this work. Williams announces here—in the destructive opening—the kind of book and the kind of poetry he is writing. The Williams of Spring and All is interested in time, even interested in history, but less so in meter, repetition, or even in figures of rhythm. In the place of rhythm and meter, Williams proposes something like pace: especially once the haphazard headings fall away, a different rhythm emerges for the relation of verse to prose. The verse and prose sections regulate themselves as fast-paced or slow-paced relative to one another, and sometimes in striking counterpoint. Some are meditative; some are frenetic. Some rewrite the history of the world in a few paragraphs; others linger over a backyard scene, a street sign, or a pastoral landscape.