The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry Michael Trussler Ian D. Copestake . The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. viii + 180 pp. US $75.00. One would expect that the editor of the William Carlos Williams Review would have an encyclopedic knowledge of both Williams's oeuvre, which is immense and multi-generic, and also the enormous amount of scholarship devoted to this central modernist American writer. Ian D. Copestake doesn't disappoint in either category. While one might dispute Copestake's claim that Williams is "the single most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (2), his familiarity and affection for Williams's writing, in addition to his mastery of the accompanying commentary (from poets, critics, and [End Page 156] biographers) make this book a valuable contribution to William Carlos Williams studies. Arguing that a youthful exposure to Unitarianism provided Williams with an ethical outlook that informed his long literary (and medical) career, Copestake urges scholars to assess Williams's hostility to tradition by reconsidering his quietly held religious ideas. More specifically, Copestake maintains that Williams's poetics of avant-garde organicism was influenced by his early exposure to the Unitarian interest in Pre-Raphaelite social philosophy and aesthetics (a Unitarian church Williams attended in Philadelphia as a young man features stained glass windows created by Henry Holiday). After establishing these connections, Copestake then reformulates Williams's complicated debts to Emerson through an analysis of the latter's strategic use of rhetoric and preoccupation with understanding the nature of contemporaneity. These initial chapters set the frame for an extended exegesis of Paterson as the embodiment of interconnected Unitarian ideals regarding public service, self-realization, and the need for "clarity." Part of Copestake's project, then, is historical. Attentive to the occasions when critics have perceived Unitarianism to be a small, perhaps even incidental part of Williams's background, Copestake wishes to provide a corrective. Usefully citing the work of Reverend George H. Badger (the first pastor of the Rutherford Unitarian church, an organization partially founded by Williams's father), Copestake delineates those Unitarian principles that he believes the young Williams would later transform into a personal poetics. The Unitarian church advocated individual freedom—with the corollary that self-actualization contributed to spiritual growth and that this growth implicitly enabled service to others—and Badger insisted that the struggles inherent in ordinary, seemingly lacklustre lives are the "'sources of noblest flights of literature ... and causes of great heroisms'" (21). For Copestake, the church congregation's primary ethos "'NOTHING THAT IS NOT TRUE' ... provides a source for William's own five word modernist creed ... 'No ideas but in things'" (17). To some, this particular connection might seem tenuous; however, Copestake is quite persuasive when he eloquently depicts Unitarian symbolism and Pre-Raphaelite artworks (and corresponding aesthetics) as being a foundation for Williams's ongoing use of floral imagery. In making his case, Copestake deftly cites Williams's essays, letters, and autobiography, assembling a useful and cohesive synthesis of the varying ideas and impulses that formed Williams's poetics. (I'll return to The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams shortly because I sense it intimates a Williams that is possibly different from the one presented in this study.) Copestake is often a talented [End Page 157] close reader, providing several nuanced interpretations of poems from different stages of Williams's career, although much of the textual analysis quite properly engages Paterson, given the poem's emphasis on the fraught intersection between the local and the poet's mind (which for Copestake is where the Unitarian ethos and Williams's poetics are most clearly mapped out). That Copestake conscientiously treats individual poems as artworks that seek to be autonomous is one of the book's virtues; Copestake skilfully illuminates the verbal complexity that Williams sculpts through line breaks and paradigmatic semantic shifts. On several occasions, though, one wonders if the overall thesis pertaining to Unitarianism is necessary for these astute readings. Put differently, The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry usefully fills in several gaps in our understanding of the poet's intellectual biography (although readers...

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