William Carlos Williams and the Metaphors of Science

Picabia - The Love Machine

What does physics have to do with poetry?

Ever since the Romantics famously let their hair grow wild and declared that poets were better off rejecting science and turning inward to seek truth by the imagination, academics have been reluctant to draw strong parallels between the work of scientists and the work of poets. Our theories tend to rely upon uncovering sociological histories, and we tend to think of poets as bohemians who write “from the heart”; whose work entails uncovering the psychological life rather than in probing physical reality.

Now, William Carlos Williams was certainly no bohemian. Although he maintained productive friendships with numerous artists and writers of his day, he spent his life working as a paediatrician in a small New Jersey town. He was as well-educated in the sciences as in the arts; he read scientific journals and went to lectures by the pioneers of thermodynamics and atomic chemistry of the early 20th century. Williams often writes explicitly about the discoveries of early 20th century physics – much like the theme of evolution repeatedly appears in Thomas Hardy. For instance, in 1915, Albert Einstein published the paper outlining the General Theory of Relativity; and 6 years later Williams Published the following poem:

Oscar Dominguez - Nostalgia of Space

Overture to a Dance of Locomotives [extract]

A leaning pyramid of sunlight, narrowing
out at a high window, moves by the clock:
disaccordant hands straining out from
a centre: inevitable postures infinitely
repeated –
two – twofour – twoeight!

…

Poised horizontal
on glittering parallels the dingy cylinders
packed with a warm glow – inviting entry –
pull against the hour. But brakes can
hold a fixed posture till –
The whistle!

Not twoeight. Not twofour. Two!
Gliding windows. Colored cooks sweating
in a small kitchen. Taillights –

In time: twofour!
In time: twoeight!

- rivers are tunnelled: trestles
cross oozy swampland: wheels repeating
the same gesture remain relatively
stationary: rails forever parallel
return on themselves infinitely.
The dance is sure.

This is probably quite an obscure example – but you can see that he talks explicitly about both Special and General relativity. Note that the metaphor of trains is the one that Einstein himself chose to illustrate Special Relativity – and we are aware of how much science communicates through metaphor in this way. The poem closes with the phrase “the dance is sure” – expressing, perhaps, an appreciation for the certainty of physical law. [The trains – the older symbol of technological advancement; operates on the laws of Newtonian physics – now transformed into the “dancing” locomotives of Einsteinian relativity]

So – although it is an amusing game to trace the scientific themes within Williams’s poems, I am actually interested in a more meta-physical (or, meta-poetical) question – given that Williams clearly believed in the power of scientific metaphors to explain reality and truth; what does the poem do? Does the language of poetry operate differently to the language of science? And if so, what does poetry offer us that other uses of language can not?

Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams, describes why the scientific changes of the turn of the century were so revolutionary. He says,

In these seven years [between 1895 and 1902] man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his sense … [We] seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused – physics stark mad in metaphysics.[1]

Newtonian physics, which had dominated scientific thought until the 20th century, presents a view of the universe as stable. Objects are inert unless acted upon by some force. His paradigm largely describes our common sense experience of matter. Einstienian physics, on the other hand, proves that space and time are themselves dynamic quantities that are effected by forces and movements – and in turn, the curvature of space-time influences the way in which bodies move and forces act. All of the universe is in motion; E = mc2 - mass is energy. 20th century physics asks us to imagine reality on scales that we have never experienced, and to believe that the laws of nature are not what we would expect. This requires a leap of imaginative faith that is near-religious:

Where then will you find the only true belief in our day? Only in science. That is the realm of the incomplete, the convinced hypothesis – the frightening embodiment of mysteries, of transmutations from force to body and from body to – nothingness. Light.[2]

Williams reflects this exhilarating sense of a universe in motion by presenting us with poems that are built with verbs. Objects are never static; he does not paint still lives. Churches “tremble”, trees “arch”, and socks “endure”. This process is not simple personification; rather it is a recognition of a universal animating force, and a record of the mind encountering the world through language.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

Note that the metaphoric relationship is between the snake and the poem about the snake; in this way he is drawing explicit attention to the disjunct between signified and signifier. “No ideas but in things” was his motto – and he preferences concrete words over abstract ones. However, the tension for us as reader lies in the fact that we do not have access to the snake but only to the word or the idea, “snake”. “No ideas but in things” is problematic, then, as long as we insist on reading the poem as a signifier or a secondary representation of reality (and some hypothetical real snake). Clearly, the poem insists that we don’t. Instead, we must take the poem itself as the object. Here is another example:

Picasso - Nature Mort

The Dish of Fruit

The table describes
nothing: four legs, by which
it becomes a table. Four lines
by which it becomes a quatrain,

the poem that lifts the dish
of fruit, if we say it is like
a table – how will it describe
the contents of the poem?

Clearly I am drawing here on Structuralist and Post-Structuralist assuming that language can function as a closed system. But the image that Williams chose is perhaps more illuminating. He fixed upon the metaphor of the dynamo, and claimed that the poem is a machine. This image is far removed from the Romantic conception which sees poetry as sentimental or emotional; something written in times of grief or two express love. No, he argued,

There is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.[3]

Williams was not alone amongst Modernist poets in arguing that good poetry should aim to be objective; that the “I” persona of the lyric should vanish; that the distinction between the speaking subject and the described object is an illusory one. T. S. Eliot argues something similar in Tradition and the Individual Talent[4], and Williams’s once-mentor Ezra Pound pioneered a similar notion. The poem is not expressive but creative – it creates meaning rather than communicates it. Therefore it does not matter if the subject matter of the poem is banal and mundane. For instance, the short poem called, Poem.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

Because the content is so mundane, what is foregrounded is the poetic process itself – as is highlighted by the title. We are almost tempted construct meaning out of it – to claim that the cat symbolizes the phallus and the flowerpot the nihilistic void – but what is interesting about the poem (and there are many others like it) is the fact that it is powered so vigorously by the mechanisms of poetry: syntax and rhythm; or, form and sound.

The first word in the poem, “As”, places the poem within a continuous tense. The cat and its actions are conjured “as” the poem is read. The “as” also requires the sentence to be completed by a second clause, and this expectation propels the poem. The action is slowed down, the cat moves part by part – first “the right forefoot” and then “the hind”. The action is slowed down further by the modifier “carefully”; and the crucial verb “stepped” is withheld until the eighth line.

Rhythm reinforces the pace postulated by the syntax; the trotting rhythm of “as the cat / climbed over / the top of // the jamcloset” is interrupted by “carefully”, the rhythm is interrupted, mimetically reinforcing the considered, uncomfortably tense moment as the cat shifts its centre of balance – and then is resumed as the undefiable law of gravity takes over. It is an immensely satisfying poem to read, as it creates the sensation of a physical experience. This is the poetic engine. It is the foregrounding the mechanisms of language that are objects to be experienced in themselves.

But, of course, engines must have functions; dynamos must power a system. What system does Williams’s poetry power?

If Relativity was one cornerstone of 20th century science, then another was surely thermodynamics. Thermodynamics and the notion of entropy developed during the 19th century, but entered popular culture as metaphysical concepts in the early 20th. Entropy, simply put, is the rule of energy dissipation; the notion that the universe becomes increasingly chaotic and finally runs down. Entropy is the reason for the irreversibility of time, it is the rule that ash cannot again be flame. Like evolution, entropy became a metaphor for the decadence of Western culture, and it is cultural entropy that is expressed in works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s Waste Land. Both works, with their numerous allusions to literary tradition and the chaos of their forms, argue for an old culture, a tradition that has become so overbearing that it allows no space for comprehension; it is the information overload that becomes nonsensical, that Don Delillo will later call “noise”. Life continues but there is less and less energy in the system, and living becomes painful, leading Eliot to call April “the cruellest month / breeding lilacs out of the dead land”.

Williams knew that Eliot was a great poet, but felt that his pessimism and his clinging on to the European tradition of poetry betrayed the poetic responsibility of the American Modernist, which was to “make it new”, as Ezra Pound says. Williams was working on his epic poem Paterson at the same time that Eliot was composing the Waste Land – he published books 4 and 5 after he had read Eliot’s great eulogy for European poetry, and consciously subverts Eliot’s idioms within them. Here are just two small examples:

Williams

The sea is our home whither all rivers
(wither) run .

the nostalgic sea
sopped with our cries
Thalassa! Thalassa!
…
. draws us in to drown, of losses
and regrets .
(Paterson Book IV)


This is the blast
the eternal close
the final somersault
the end.
(Paterson Book IV)

Eliot

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
…
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
(The Waste Land)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
(Hollow Men)

Paterson is built around the central image of a waterfall, which is perhaps the ideal metaphor for entropy (it is a deadly force that only runs in one direction). However, by the end of the poem, Williams insists that the river has begun to run backwards, because of the power of the poem to create sensual experience, within a poem, “the scent of a rose / startle[s] us anew”.

The concept of the permanence of the poem in a world that is otherwise filled with death and decay is an old one; one that occurs for instance in Shakespeare’s sonnets. What is unique in Williams’s poetics is a consciousness that the poem does not preserve lived experience; rather it constructs an experience using uniquely poetic mechanisms. The energy of poetry is immediate and sensual.

A life that is here and now is timeless … All things otherwise grow old and rot. By long experience the only thing that remains unchanged and unchangeable is the work of art.

Often, in traditional poetic discourse, the fertility of love and sex is the figure for this renewing force. Williams consciously rejects this, however. He makes reference to an essay by Henry Adams called “The Dynamo and the Virgin”. In this article Adams (with his idiosyncratic wit) argues that America has never quite managed to free itself from the fear of sex that they inherited from their Puritan ancestors. In American culture, the woman is substituted by the machine, which is eroticised and fetishised. The mechanised woman is a recurring figure in Modernist art (e.g. Kandinsky and Duchamp) and occurs over and over in Williams’s poems.

In book IV of Paterson, he subverts the image of the Holy Virgin by presenting her as Marie Curie, and in her praises a feminine power that is scientific rather than r(R)omantic.

From Paterson Book IV

a cavity aching
toward fission; a hollow,
a woman waiting to be filled

- a luminosity of elements, the
current leaping!
Pitchblende from Austria, the
valence of Uranium inexplicably
increased. Curie, the man, gave up
his work to buttress her.

But she is pregnant!
Poor Joseph,

the Italians say.

Glory to God in the highest
and on earth, peace, goodwill to
men!

Believe it or not.

A dissonance
in the valence of Uranium
led to the discovery [dissonance = juxtaposing, anti-metaphor]

Dissonance
(if you are interested)
leads to discovery

- to dissect away
the block and leave
a separate metal:

hydrogen
the flame, helium the
pregnant ash

[1] Adams, Henry (1918; 1931). The Education of Henry Adams. Random House, NewYork: p. 1069.
[2] Williams, William Carlos (
[3] Williams, William Carlos (
[4] Page 41.