Man Ray (1890–1976) Gelatin silver print, 1924
The next great poetic credo after Ezra Pound’s “make it new” was William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things,” which occurs in his epic poem Paterson (1951). The line continues: “nothing but the blank faces of the houses / and cylindrical trees / bent, forked by preconception and accident.”
Unlike Pound’s Cantos, with their omniscient narrator/composer, in Paterson Williams worked from the inside out, generalizing from a highly localized, closely observed community in his native New Jersey; Paterson for Williams is like Dublin for James Joyce.
Williams was a practicing obstetrician, and his work may have provided him with the necessary emotional distance to be both empathetic and distant at the same time. In his poetry Williams wrote lines that blended “preconception and accident” to assemble a world that made a whole from fragments.
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheel Barrow,” 1923