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Williams and the New Mode of Poetic Diction ; reading Paterson

Few poems have ever priced as high as William Carlos Williams`s Paterson, if one may closely review the conceptual framework of the whole component. The setting for this drama of giants is given in a spirit of local pride. He has searched the world about him for the focal symbol that Paterson is not only the hero but also the heroine, not only a city but also cliffs and a waterfall. Judging the total merit of Paterson, one must realize that “a dispersal and a metamorphosis” are particularly prominent in the methods Williams uses to interchange man and certain aspects of his environment in order to compel a new awareness in the horizen of the new mode of poetic diction. Williams intended Paterson to be this poem which would aerticulate his entire environment. He sought to make the poem inclusive of both the local realities of this environment and of their universal implications. He felt that his task as a poet was to write particularly upon the thing before him, as physician works upon a patient, in the particular to discover the universal(Auto. 301). Williams throughout his poem has given the city a life organic as a man`s life. Thus he has much to say, mostly about language, things, women, divorce, poetic language and the poem as a field of action. For his own pious effort to the actual, Williams has required a practical kind of language, a language to reveal the realities between subject and object, clearing up the distorting blur between language and reality. The language he is seeking is to be the one he speaks everyday, in other words, his own daily language. It is time-consuming that Williams has been wasting fifty years in a one-sided battle with Europe. What he has been fighting is not Europe herself but America`s reluctance to see her own true image. To look at what it is in his environment around him is required his own language to observe and draw what is real behind day-to-day living.