William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and The New York Art Scene

William Carlos Williams,
Frank O’Hara,
and the New York Art Scene
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Frank O’Hara,
Paul R. Cappucci
Madison • Teaneck
Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
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2010 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cappucci, Paul R.
William Carlos Williams, Frank O’Hara, and the New York art scene / Paul R.
Cappucci.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8386-4218-4 (alk. paper)
1. Williams, William Carlos, 1883–1963—Knowledge—Art. 2. Williams,
William Carlos, 1883–1963—Knowledge—Abstract expressionism. 3. O’Hara,
Frank, 1926-1966—Knowledge—Art. 4. O’Hara, Frank, 1926–1966—
Knowledge—Abstract expressionism. 5. Art and literature—United States—
History—20th century. 6. Art in literature. I. Title.
PS3545.I544Z5826 2010
811⬘.52—dc22 2009035099
printed in the united states of america
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This book is dedicated to
Sharon, Daniel, Timothy, James, and Margaret
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Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Introduction 13
1. A Poet ‘‘Better Than the Movies’’ 25
2. ‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’: Williams and Abstract

Expressionism 51
3. Imaginative ‘‘Blobs of Paint’’: Jackson Pollock in the Work

of Williams and O’Hara 72
4. ‘‘A Blossoming of the Spirit’’: Williams, Emanuel Romano,

and the Authenticity of Artistic Expression 98
5. Efficiency in Form: Artistry and Authenticity in the Works

of Williams, O’Hara, and Smith 118
Conclusion 146
Notes 151
Bibliography 156
Index 164
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Acknowledgments
GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS GIVEN TO NEW DIRECTIONS PUB-

lishing Corporation for permission to reprint the published and un-
published works of William Carlos Williams cited in this book. The
Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. Copyright 1948. 1951 by
William Carlos Williams. Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939. Copy-
right 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Copyright
1982, 1986 by William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Collected
Poems: Volume II, 1939–1962. Copyright 1944, 1953, 1962, by Wil-
liam Carlos Williams. Copyright 1988 by William Eric Williams
and Paul H. Williams. The Embodiment of Knowledge. Copyright
1974 by Florence H. Williams. I Wanted to Write a Poem. Copyright
1958 by William Carlos Williams. Imaginations. Copyright 1970
by Florence H. Williams. In the American Grain. Copyright 1925 by
James Laughlin. Copyright 1933 by William Carlos Williams. Pater-
son. Copyright 1946, 1948, 1949, 1958 by William Carlos Williams.
A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists. Copy-
right 1978 by the Estate of Florence H. Williams. Selected Essays.
Copyright 1954 by William Carlos Williams. Selected Letters of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams. Copyright 1957 by William Carlos Williams.
Something To Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets. Copyright
1985 by William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Interviews
with William Carlos Williams: Speaking Straight Ahead. Copyright
1976 by the Estate of William Carlos Williams. Previously unpub-
lished material by William Carlos Williams included in the book
2010 by the Estates of Paul H. Williams and William Eric Williams.
I also wish to acknowledge that excerpts appearing from Frank
O’Hara’s Art Chronicles, Standing Still and Walking in New York, Amo-
rous Nightmares of Delay, and unpublished letters are copyright 2010
by Maureen Granville-Smith and are reprinted by permission of Mau-
reen Granville-Smith. Excerpts from ‘‘The Day Lady Died,’’ ‘‘On
Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,’’ ‘‘A Step Away from Them,’’ and ‘‘What
Sledgehammer? or W.C. Williams’s Been Attacked!’’ are copyright
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10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1964 by Frank O’Hara and reprinted by permission of City Lights

Books. Selections from ‘‘Autobiographia Literaria,’’ ‘‘Today,’’ ‘‘Poem
Read at Joan Mitchell’s,’’ ‘‘Why I Am Not a Painter,’’ ‘‘Digression on
Number 1, 1948,’’ ‘‘Biotherm (for Bill Berkson),’’ ‘‘Christmas Card to
Grace Hartigan,’’ ‘‘Memorial Day 1950,’’ ‘‘A Walk on Sunday After-
noon,’’ ‘‘To A Poet,’’ ‘‘Mozart Chemisier,’’ ‘‘Ode on Causality,’’ and
‘‘Personism: A Manifesto’’ from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF
FRANK O’HARA by Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen, copy-
right 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Es-
tate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc.
Also, I offer grateful acknowledgment to Julie Dreyfuss Tatum for
permission to quote from Emanuel Romano’s unpublished diary and
correspondence, as well as to reprint his painting Self Portrait (1956).
Finally, I thank Bob Arnold, literary executor for Cid Corman’s estate,
for permission to quote from Cid Corman’s unpublished correspon-
dence.
I also wish to thank the library staffs at the Beinecke Library at Yale
University, the Morris Library at the University of Delaware, the
Mandeville Special Collections, University of California, San Diego,
the Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin,
and the Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Re-
search Center at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. I also wish to
thank the professional staffs of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
and Associated University Presses for their feedback and efforts to
produce this book.
I am indebted to the students, administration, and faculty of Geor-
gian Court University. Conversations with several colleagues influ-
enced the development of this project: Claire Gallagher, Suzanne
Pilgram, Sister Phyllis Bremen, and John Woznicki. I also would like
to thank Mary Basso, Research Librarian at G.C.U., who located valu-
able information on Emanuel Romano. Michelle Depolo, a former
student, offered research assistance during the project’s early stages
with generous support from a G.C.U. Summer Research Grant. I also
am grateful to G.C.U. for granting me a sabbatical to complete the
writing and revising of this manuscript.
On a personal note, I would like to thank Dr. Ian Copestake for
providing me with several opportunities to present my work, including
two W. C. Williams conferences held at Johann Wolfgang Goethe
University in Frankfurt, Germany. I also would like to thank my men-
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 11
tor Merrill Maguire Skaggs. She offered steady encouragement and

read an early draft of the manuscript. Her sharp insights guided me
through the final revision. Finally I would like to thank my parents
and sisters and brothers for all of their support through the years. My
children, Daniel, Timothy, James and Margaret, have been so patient
with me during my research, writing, and traveling. Sharon, my wife,
has offered steadfast support and wise counsel along the way. She also
designed the book’s cover. This book would not have been written
without her.
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Introduction
POETIC REPUTATIONS, OR ANY REPUTATIONS FOR THAT MATTER, CAN

be ephemeral. Poets lauded during their lifetimes may find their work
distrusted or dismissed by later generations. Conversely poets found
suspect by their contemporaries may be later embraced by a younger
generation of poets and readers. William Carlos Williams and Frank
O’Hara are two poets who may better fit into the latter group. The
case of Williams is an intriguing one. Relatively unknown early in his
career, Williams’s reputation as a major American poet grew through-
out his life and resulted in invitations to read at prestigious universi-
ties. Since his death in 1963, recognition for Williams’s verse has
steadily increased. Once known only for his ‘‘red wheelbarrow’’ poem
or that ‘‘plum’’ poem, Williams’s fuller range of work has garnered
greater exposure. One way to gauge this exposure is through the inclu-
sion of his poems in recent anthologies. For instance, the Oxford Book
of American Poetry (2006), edited by David Lehman, includes twenty-
five Williams poems. The New Anthology of American Poetry (Rutgers
University Press, 2005), vol. 2, edited by Steven Gould Axelrod, Cam-
ille Roman, and Thomas Travisano, contains twenty-seven Williams
poems, including an excerpt from Paterson and a prose excerpt from
Spring and All. The Norton Anthology of American Literature (2007), a
popular college-level anthology, also includes an excerpt of Spring and
All among its Williams selections. In 2000, Cary Nelson reprinted The
Descent of Winter and ‘‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book I,’’ along
with several other Williams poems in his acclaimed Anthology of Mod-
ern American Poetry. Besides this anthology exposure, Chris Mac-
Gowan edited the compilation Poetry for Young People: William Carlos
Williams (2003) as part of a series that also features Walt Whitman,
Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost. A River of Words: The Story of Wil-
liam Carlos Williams (2008) offers children another introduction to the
poet’s life and work. Even Williams’s highly experimental work like
The Great American Novel (2003) has recently been reissued by the
small press Green Integer as part of its Masterworks of Fiction series.
13
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14 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, FRANK O’HARA
Williams’s lasting legacy is not only evident in the republication of

his work. He also continues to receive consistent attention among lit-
erary scholars. With the recent resurgence of the William Carlos Wil-
liams Review, critics have regained an important venue for sharing the
latest research and ideas about his life and work. With the help of the
William Carlos Williams Society, Professor Ian Copestake has orga-
nized two international conferences over the past few years in Frank-
furt, Germany, attracting scholars from all over the United States,
Canada, and Europe. Professor Copestake also has edited two volumes
that commemorate and reflect Williams’s varying influences upon
other writers: Rigors of Beauty: Essays in Commemoration of William Car-
los Williams (2004) and Points of Contact: The Legacy of William Carlos
Williams (2007). In the latter collection, Copestake shows through the
varying contributors how Williams’s legacy spreads from Zukofsky
and Creeley to Lowell and O’Hara.
Even Williams’s hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey, has been
active in honoring one of its favorite sons. In 2005, organizers held a
daylong symposium, featuring such noted critics as Kerry Driscoll,
Chris MacGowan, and Emily Mitchell Wallace. The day concluded
with a performance of Williams’s play A Dream of Love introduced by
the famed actress Judith Malina, cofounder of The Living Theatre.
The symposium in 2008, celebrating the poet’s 125th birthday, built
upon this success and included talks by famed writers Robert Coles
and Paul Mariani. Recently Williams even gained induction into the
New Jersey Hall of Fame, a venue recognizing such notable Garden
State citizens as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Bruce Spring-
steen.
As a now acknowledged major figure among American modernists,
Williams’s reputation appears secure. Frank O’Hara’s reputation, al-
though not widespread during his lifetime, has grown steadily over
the years. Once dismissed as a minor poet of casual poems, O’Hara
has emerged as a central figure in contemporary American poetry.
Like Williams, the republication of his work in anthologies reflects
the high regard for his verse. Fifteen O’Hara poems appear in Leh-
man’s recent Oxford Book of American Poetry. The most recent edition
of The Norton Anthology of American Literature now includes five of his
poems (with the recent addition of ‘‘A True Account of Talking to
the Sun at Fire Island’’) and an excerpt of his famous mock-manifesto
‘‘Personism.’’ Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes
eight of his poems. Besides O’Hara’s appearance in these anthologies,
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INTRODUCTION 15
a new collection of his Selected Poems (Knopf, 2008) edited by Mark

Ford has been published. In terms of critical publications, besides the
reissuing of Marjorie Perloff’s landmark Frank O’Hara: Poet among
Painters (1998), Lytle Shaw has recently published Frank O’Hara: The
Poetics of Coterie (2006) that challenges the dismissive notion of the
term coterie and offers a new language for appreciating and under-
standing O’Hara’s poetics.
Like Williams, friends and admirers celebrate O’Hara’s life and
work. In 2000, the Poetry Society of America devoted a journal issue
of Crossroads to O’Hara. Among the contributors were Mark Doty,
Barbara Guest, and John Ashbery. The Museum of Modern Art reis-
sued In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems (2005) and held a
three-day festival in 2006 to celebrate O’Hara’s poetry and work at
the museum. In addition, Billy Collins and Paul Violi participated in
a 2007 celebration of O’Hara’s verse presented by the National Book
Foundation. On July 16, 2008, the Museum of Modern Art commem-
orated O’Hara’s life and the publication of his new Selected Poems with
a poetry reading sponsored by the museum, the Poetry Society of
America, and Knopf.
In consideration of the respect and adulation both men continue to
receive over forty years after their deaths, it is clear that each has sig-
nificantly contributed to our experience, understanding, and apprecia-
tion of contemporary American poetry. My own exploration of their
work began shortly after defending my dissertation on Williams back
in 1998. It was at that time that I returned to reading O’Hara’s poetry.
His poems seemed as fresh and alive as anything that I was reading at
the time and I knew that I wanted to spend more time with them. As
I continued reading O’Hara, I could not help thinking about Wil-
liams, a poet whose work (despite the draining demands of dissertation
writing) remains invigorating to me. As the focus for the study
emerged, I knew that I wanted to explore the extent of Williams’s in-
fluence on O’Hara. For O’Hara, Williams was one of the few Ameri-
can poets, as he famously remarks in his essay ‘‘Personism,’’ ‘‘better
than the movies’’ (1995, 498). I already had read several informative
studies that linked the two poets. Most notably, Marjorie Perloff ex-
plored it in her critically acclaimed Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters.
As of this time, though, no book-length study has focused solely upon
the scope of O’Hara’s response to Williams. I wanted to examine
more exclusively why O’Hara was drawn to Williams, as well as what
he accepted and resisted in Williams’s verse. While researching this
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angle, I also became fascinated with both men’s keen understanding

and appreciation for the visual arts and their active involvement with
the avant-garde (all while maintaining their day jobs). These particular
connections reshaped my focus. Not only would this study examine
Williams’s influence on O’Hara, but it would examine Williams’s re-
sponse to Abstract Expressionism, the art movement O’Hara most
closely identified with throughout his lifetime. To date no book-
length study has examined Williams’s response to this art movement.
It should be recalled that both Williams and O’Hara viewed their
poetic vocations in relation to the visual arts. O’Hara chose poetry
over painting because, as he says, ‘‘one can write relatively fast’’ (1983,
21). Williams offers similar reasoning: ‘‘I might easily have become a
painter . . . except that the articulate art of poetry gave a more immedi-
ate opportunity for the attack’’ (1958a, 3). For both the busy museum
curator and the busy doctor, the need for expressive swiftness dictated
their decisions to be poets rather than painters. Yet neither man’s fast-
paced lifestyle precluded his interest in the avant-garde trends occur-
ring in the visual arts. It is possible that this ‘‘on the go’’ lifestyle also
influenced their mutual interest in an art movement rooted in their
American locale that stressed design, action, and immediacy.
To draw out the significance of the visual arts for both of these
poets, particularly in relation to their American roots, this study exam-
ines their ties to the Abstract Expressionists or New York School art-
ists. Many critics have traced the emergence of the New York School
to World War II. This emerging school represented a reshifting of the
avant-garde from Paris to New York. Williams had been calling on
American artists to move to the forefront of artistic innovation; these
artists of the New York School unintentionally fulfilled that call.
Williams was clearly not an insider to the movement. He was aware
and supportive of it, yet he was uncertain about its progression. He
pointedly references the imaginative nature of Jackson Pollock’s ‘‘de-
sign’’ in his famed Paterson V, and he praises Robert Motherwell in
his lecture entitled ‘‘The American Spirit in Art.’’ Yet he also openly
questions the relevance of continuing in the abstractionist mode of
painting. O’Hara, in contrast to Williams, was clearly an insider. More
certain of the movement, he became a vital critic and promoter of
many of the artists that composed this group. Consequently focusing
on the outsider Williams and the insider O’Hara in the light of this
artistic movement provides a unique vantage point for examining its
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INTRODUCTION 17
varying appeal to avant-garde poets, as well as for appreciating a de-

fining moment in American art history.
Initially when this study began, it was intended to focus on Williams
and O’Hara’s correlation to many members of the Abstract Expres-
sionists—Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning, among
others. As this study progressed, however, it became apparent that the
Williams and O’Hara connection seemed most directly relevant to the
artists Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and David Smith. Such a
narrow focus is not intended to dismiss the achievement or influence
of these other artists, but it is an effort on my part to examine in
greater depth and offer greater clarity about the ways that this poetic
connection can be understood in relation to these particular American
artists. Now, there is not much evidence that Pollock, Motherwell, or
Smith read the poets (O’Hara reports that he discussed Williams’s
poetry with Smith and Motherwell; presumably, both men read
O’Hara’s work). Therefore, I cannot document that the poets influ-
enced these artists in any definitive way. Yet intriguing parallels exist
between their thoughts about creating art in America, as well as their
production of art that reflects the poets’ own aesthetic beliefs.
Before proceeding, though, it is necessary to acknowledge that the
influence of differing arts upon one another remains difficult to label
or define. O’Hara makes this point in his ‘‘Statement for Paterson So-
ciety’’: ‘‘Well you can’t have a statement saying ‘My poetry is the Sis-
tine Chapel of verse,’ or ‘My poetry is just like Pollock, de Kooning,
and Guston’ . . . first of all it isn’t’ . . .’’ (1995, 510). O’Hara’s qualifi-
cation is noteworthy. The difference in materials, mediums, and pro-
duction complicates any discussion. Also, there are essential
differences between the ways we experience the verbal and visual arts.
We see them differently, we read them differently, and we even imag-
ine them differently. Nelson Goodman writes in Languages of Art,
‘‘No amount of familiarity turns a paragraph into a picture; and no
degree of novelty makes a picture a paragraph’’ (1976, 231). Such dif-
ferences between the arts might caution critics to keep their distance.
However, as we are aware, critics continue to explore the bounds of
this comparison. According to W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘‘[t]he comparison of
poetry and painting dominates aesthetics, then, precisely because
there is so much resistance to the comparison, such a large gap to
overcome’’ (1986, 48). This gap oftentimes becomes difficult to navi-
gate, offering critics varying paths for the discovery of ‘‘resemblances’’
or the judgment of differences. Mitchell’s Iconology has been particu-
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larly helpful for understanding these difficulties. He offers a compel-

ling narrative about the ways that critics like Goodman, E. H.
Gombrich, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Edmund Burke identify
‘‘the boundary lines’’ they perceive as existing between texts and im-
ages (50).
The intrinsic problem of studying literature and the visual arts gets
compounded by the fact that experts consider their own area of exper-
tise of paramount importance, and the other subsidiary. Yet the seem-
ing advantages of both art products—you can see visual art
immediately and in its entirety, and you can read a good poem during
an extended period of leisure—serves to explain the magnetic appeal
of these opposite works to each creative group. Despite such practical
distinctions, the reading of painting and poetry, as Goodman asserts,
offer a ‘‘dynamic rather than static’’ aesthetic experience (1976, 241).
It demands the ability to make ‘‘delicate discriminations’’ and perceive
‘‘subtle relationships.’’ It calls upon us to identify ‘‘symbol systems and
characters within these systems’’ and to understand the work’s intrin-
sic relation to the world. All of this tests our ‘‘experience’’ and our
‘‘skills’’ and ultimately may even transform us (241–42).
Ultimately the differences between texts and images should not ex-
clude considerations of the way these arts resemble one another. Many
scholars, in fact, explore these resemblances with the hope of gaining
some greater understanding of the artists and their work. Now, admit-
tedly I fall into this group. My interest and enjoyment of Williams and
O’Hara’s verse has brought me to this place. To work out the parallels
between these two particular poets, a critic must consider the ways
that the visual arts have affected their poetry and their ideas about cre-
ativity. Thankfully, as evident in the many exceptional studies that in-
form my own work, I am not alone in seeking such connections. In
the introduction to Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry,
Charles Altieri makes a convincing case for studying the influence of
visual arts on modernists like Williams: ‘‘what moved their imagina-
tions and engaged them in the rather scary task of trying to be abso-
lutely modern was their specific encounters with works of art’’ (1995,
8). By approaching poets in this way, Altieri argues that we gain a ful-
ler understanding ‘‘of the challenges they saw themselves facing and
the opportunities they envisioned for making their own medium ex-
plore possible models of agency’’ (9). Altieri is not blind to the diffi-
culties inherent to such an analogical approach, especially for literary
critics. Despite such difficulties, though, he suggests that ‘‘we might
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INTRODUCTION 19
well be following precisely the tracks that fascinated those whose busi-
ness is words’’ (9). Such a comment is not intended to absolve my
study from potential errors, but rather to disclose how my literary
background may shape my reading of the resemblances between texts
and images.
The chapters of this book will examine the various contacts between
the poets and artists, ultimately revealing the scope of their shared in-
terests. The first chapter establishes the Williams and O’Hara connec-
tion. I outline the ways that O’Hara comes to Williams’s work and
how he develops a regard for the older poet. One intriguing parallel
for these men is their professional lives beyond their verse. Williams,
as many know, was a physician working in Rutherford, New Jersey.
O’Hara dramatically worked his way up at the Museum of Modern
Art. He went from selling admission tickets to planning several major
exhibits as a curator. Concomitantly both men wrote poetry as an inte-
gral part of their busy working days, focusing on the common, quotid-
ian objects that defined their particular locales. Many poems recreate
the quick pace and rhythm of this lifestyle. The study draws out that
notion more fully, identifying the ways that several poems reflect the
quickness and busyness of modern American culture.
With the poetic parallels between the two established, chapter 2 fo-
cuses primarily on Williams’s immediate contact with Abstract Ex-
pressionism. In particular, the chapter offers a close reading of
Williams’s ‘‘The American Spirit in Art,’’ an address intended as a de-
fense of the abstractionists. In his address, Williams identifies this art
movement with Robert Motherwell. Motherwell is the only member
of the New York School with whom Williams corresponded. Conse-
quently Williams’s contact with this younger painter is crucial. In this
chapter, I also set out to establish the cultural relevance of Ralph
Waldo Emerson, specifically in relation to Williams’s thoughts about
the emergence of this art movement in America. This is not just a
passing Emerson reference, but an effort to establish the foundational
concepts of action and newness that inform the rest of the book, espe-
cially as they relate to Pollock and Smith.
Chapter 3 examines the ways that Williams and O’Hara react and
respond to the famed Action-painter Jackson Pollock. It uses a 1957
issue of the Evergreen Review, seemingly commemorating Pollock, as
the starting point from which to explore how these poets relate to Pol-
lock and each other. The chapter then systematically examines the
varied references that Williams and O’Hara make about Pollock. It
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also examines several cultural and artistic connections between these

artists—such as experimentations with form, placement ‘‘in’’ the work,
and an emphasis on action.
In the fourth chapter, I move the emphasis from the famous Pollock
to a little known painter named Emanuel Romano. At a time when
Pollock and Motherwell were emerging as central figures in the avant-
garde, Williams was developing a close relationship with New York
painter Emanuel Romano, son of famed Jewish sculptor Enrico Gli-
censtein. This exceptional relationship started when Romano painted
Williams’s portrait, but it eventually became a close friendship and in-
spired Williams’s two essays ‘‘The Portrait’’ (1951) and ‘‘The Broken
Vase’’ (1957). This chapter brings to light the surprising depth of their
friendship as recorded by Romano in his diary. Beyond a biographical
scope, however, this chapter reveals the crucial significance of the Ro-
mano essays, paying particular attention to the way he defined the Ital-
ian artist against the popular trend of abstraction. It also examines his
hesitancy toward evaluating Romano’s artistry, as well as highlighting
his uncertainty over the direction of abstraction. Despite such reserva-
tions, Williams finds in Romano what he ultimately seems to appreci-
ate in artists like Motherwell and Pollock—authenticity of artistic
expression.
My final chapter looks at the sculptor David Smith. I analyze Wil-
liams’s key principles about artistic creativity in the context of David
Smith’s words and sculptures. Several critics, such as Joan Burbick,
Valerie Robillard, and David Sweet, have examined Williams’s re-
sponse to Abstract Expressionism, specifically in regard to Jackson
Pollock. Paul Mariani, Terrence Diggory, and Mike Weaver have
touched upon Williams’s interest in Motherwell. Yet few critics have
explored in-depth Williams’s relation to other members of the move-
ment, like Smith. To date, only a brief reference by Frank O’Hara re-
garding Smith’s ‘‘interest’’ in Williams’s poetry exists; no full scholarly
discussion of Williams and Smith has appeared. Yet Smith’s rise as a
sculptor is one that Williams would appreciate. His work offers a com-
pelling actualization of Williams’s ideas about ‘‘making’’ art in post-
war America. His use of found objects, efficiency of production, and
continual experimentation follow Williams’s own aesthetic practices.
Consequently this chapter utilizes the essays and poetry of Williams
and O’Hara, as well as the poetry, artistic commentary, and sculptures
of David Smith, to analyze and illustrate this important convergence
of artistic ideas and practices.
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INTRODUCTION 21
By examining O’Hara’s appreciation for Williams and Williams’s

response to the New York art scene of the 1940s and 1950s, we gain a
better understanding of their work individually, as well as together.
The younger poet certainly learned from the older poet; they both
demonstrated sensitivity to the changes occurring in the art world,
particularly evident through the work of New York artists. For the first
time, American artists appeared to be leading the way in the avant-
garde quest for the new. While there are clear links between Williams
and O’Hara, to fully appreciate this connection it is essential to exam-
ine their relation to some of the most prominent artists from this pe-
riod. By focusing on these poets and artists, it is possible to see a
unique amalgamation of ideas about art and poetry redefining Ameri-
can creativity in mid-twentieth-century America. Not only is this true
about the ideas of newness and action, but also in terms of authentic
creative expression.
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Frank O’Hara,
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1
A Poet ‘‘Better Than the Movies’’
IN HIS ESSAY ON THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, WASSILY KANDINSKY ASSERTS,

‘‘in our time, the different arts learn from one another and often re-
semble one another’’ (1994, 148). Kandinsky’s remark carries special
relevance when exploring the poetry of William Carlos Williams and
Frank O’Hara—two poets immersed in the art world. Williams had
close friendships with painters like Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler,
and Marsden Hartley, to name but a few. O’Hara developed close ties
with a later generation of painters like Larry Rivers, David Smith, and
Joan Mitchell, again, to name but a few. Numerous studies have ex-
plored Williams’s participation with the artists of his era—Bram Dijk-
stra, Henry Sayre, and Peter Halter.1 Marjorie Perloff has defined, in
many ways, O’Hara’s poetic and personal relationships with painters
of his generation in Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters. These works
have informed my own efforts to understand Williams and O’Hara’s
perception of Abstract Expressionism in America.
To begin a study of the poets and these New York School artists,
it’s first necessary to recognize the extent of Williams and O’Hara’s
connection to one another. For me, Fred McDarrah’s 1959 photo-
graph of O’Hara at an Artist Club’s panel discussion encapsulates the
amalgamation of these poets and the New York art scene. McDarrah
frames O’Hara at the center of his picture; O’Hara appears earnestly
engaged and addressing the panelists. On a bulletin board directly
above him, appears an advertisement for William Carlos Williams’s
Many Loves, a play being staged that year by Julian Beck and Judith
Malina at The Living Theatre. What is so compelling about this pho-
tograph is the presence of this ‘‘old’’ poet’s work at this vital spot for
the younger generation of the avant-garde—it suggests that, despite
his age and infirmity, Williams’s work still matters here. According to
Jed Perl, who offers an enlightening study of the New York scene in
his recent book New Art City, this generational amalgamation was key
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to the Club: ‘‘What presumably gave the goings-on at the Club their
unique dynamic was the fact that a number of different generations—
and backgrounds and attitudes—were involved. The Club could be a
crazy laboratory, where these two generations, as different as they
were, discovered that they were equally suspicious of ideologies, artis-
tic or otherwise’’ (2005, 149). McDarrah’s photo with the Many Loves
flyer above O’Hara portrays one key pairing in this generational labo-
ratory.
Poetry and the Workplace
As previously mentioned, Williams and O’Hara had active profes-

sional lives apart from their writing careers. Williams worked as a pe-
diatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey, the same town where he was
born and where he died. Most of his neighbors didn’t know him as the
avant-garde modernist who changed the way poetry was thought
about and written—rather, they simply saw him as ‘‘Doc’’ Williams.2
For Williams, the decision to be a doctor was not at the expense of
his poetic aspirations. He viewed his physician’s work as providing the
means necessary to write poetry. As he explains in his Autobiography,
‘‘But it was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine,
for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed,
would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to. . . . I
would not court disease, live in the slums for the sake of art, give lice
a holiday. I would not ‘die for art,’ but live for it, grimly! and work,
work, work (like Pop), beat the game and be free (like Mom, poor
soul!) to write, write as I alone should write’’ (1951a, 51). Clearly Wil-
liams had a plan, a ‘‘design’’ as he termed it, to be a poet. No doubt it
would be on his own terms, evidence of his drive to write in his own
unique way. Amazingly Williams balanced the chaotic nature of his
medical practice with a prolific and critically acclaimed body of work
as a poet, essayist, dramatist, and fiction writer.
Williams’s work schedule was demanding. A poem like ‘‘Com-
plaint’’ captures the on-call component of the profession: ‘‘They call
me and I go. / It is a frozen road / past midnight’’ (1986, 153). From
Williams’s perspective, though, his job did not subvert his verse. His
working life enabled him to make contact with people and situations
that many people never witness. In his Autobiography, he describes it
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1: A POET ‘‘BETTER THAN THE MOVIES’’ 27
this way: ‘‘I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor,
defeated body into those gulfs and grottos. And the astonishing thing
is that at such times and in such places—foul as they may be with the
stinking ischio-rectal abscesses of our comings and goings—just there,
the thing, in all its greatest beauty, may for a moment be freed to fly
for a moment guiltily about the room. . . . it has fluttered about me for
a moment, a phrase which I quickly write down on anything at hand,
any piece of paper I can grab’’ (1951a, 289). In this way, Williams’s
medical work provided him with the opportunity to know people in
the most intimate of ways. His work consequently fed into his creativ-
ity and poetry production: ‘‘I have never felt that medicine interfered
with me but rather that it was my very food and drink, the very thing
which made it possible for me to write’’ (357).
Like Williams, O’Hara viewed his work with visual arts as compati-
ble with poetry. He first sought a front desk job at the Museum of
Modern Art in 1951. His initial purpose for working here was to get
close to Alfred Barr’s Matisse retrospective. His duties, though, did
not prohibit or inhibit his creativity. James Schuyler remembered him
writing a poem entitled ‘‘It’s the Blue!’’ on yellow lined paper while
waiting to sell tickets at the museum (1988, 82). Jane Freilicher recalls
him composing poems at a typewriter on the counter: ‘‘He had this
sort of instant creativity’’ (Gooch 1993, 208). As Brad Gooch explains,
O’Hara’s job ‘‘combine[d] his need for art, money, friendship, and
poetry.’’
O’Hara did not stay chained to his front desk duties. In true Frank-
lin fashion, albeit with an avant-garde twist, O’Hara worked his way
from selling postcards and tickets to organizing exhibits as a museum
curator. Like so many who rise through the ranks, the further along
he went professionally, the busier he became. His assistant Renée Neu
remembered him this way: ‘‘Sitting at my desk, with my back to you
in our cramped little office, I never tried to learn whether you were
drafting a letter, working on an introduction or writing a poem. You
would go on working and then the phone would ring: Frank, from
what poem is the following line? asks a well-known and literate
trustee; Frank, Help! says one of your many friends who proceeds to
dump on you his problems and/or the problems of his friends. And
you always managed to come up with the right answer’’ (1988, 91).
Neu’s reminiscence captures the frenetic pace that O’Hara kept, espe-
cially once he acquired his curatorial responsibilities and designed
shows on Pollock, Kline, and Smith.
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The time and energy required to perform his duties would seem a
drain on his poetic creativity. Yet it appears that, like Williams, the
poetry and the work complemented one another. Waldo Rasmussen,
a fellow curator at MoMA, offers the strongest support for this obser-
vation: ‘‘I don’t think his museum career depleted him. On the con-
trary, I think his involvement with American painting and sculpture
fed into his poetry, both as a creative model and as part of his subject
matter—which I take to be his sensibility operating in the specific
New York art world arena which was part of his life’’ (1988, 87). There
were times when his work seemed to impact his productivity; specifi-
cally Gooch notes this to be true of his last years (1993, 438).3 He even
left MoMA for a brief period from 1954 to 1955 (247, 257); however,
O’Hara apparently did not have plans to leave the museum before his
sudden death.
Although Williams’s and O’Hara’s jobs were strikingly different, they
both viewed their work as a necessary part of their creative lives. The
demands of their jobs, however, did not preclude their avant-garde in-
terests, whether in art or verse. It also did not preclude their ability to
create—whether it was Williams typing between patient appointments
or O’Hara composing a poem atop a sales counter. Williams describes
it this way: ‘‘. . . there is always time to bang out a few pages. The
thing isn’t to find the time for it—we waste hours every day doing
absolutely nothing at all—the difficulty is to catch the evasive life of
the thing, to phrase the words in such a way that stereotype will yield
a moment of insight. That is where the difficulty lies’’ (1951a, 359).
This ability to create verse amid the day-to-day demands of a struc-
tured work environment seems to separate them from many of their
peers. Yet it is not just the capacity to juggle work and poetry, but their
ability to see beyond banal surfaces to express the intrinsic value of the
things that made up their experiences. Compound that ability with
their willingness to record it in a new language—this ultimately is
what makes Williams and O’Hara’s verse unique and memorable.
Redefining the American Poetic
At their core, both men refused to place restrictions on the things

they included in their poems. They did not turn away from the coarse-
ness of American materials. Wallace Stevens describes it as the ‘‘anti-
poetic’’ in Williams’s verse (1980, 125), and John Ashbery calls it the
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‘‘anti-literary and anti-artistic’’ in O’Hara’s poems (O’Hara 1995, vii).

Attention to such subject matter reflects their rebellious attitude
toward perceived literary conventions. Kevin Stein remarks, ‘‘It may
be somewhat misleading to think of O’Hara as ‘anti-literary and anti-
poetic,’ as Ashbery describes him; he rebels less against ‘literature’ and
‘poetry’ than against the definition (and limits) given those terms by
the dominant literary establishment’’ (1990, 360). Stein’s reading of
O’Hara’s rebellion seems true of Williams as well. The Rutherford
poet refused to acknowledge any sort of antipoetic distinction: ‘‘It’s all
one to me—the anti-poetic is not something to enhance the poetic—
it’s all one piece’’ (1978, 52). This emphasis upon inclusiveness,
though, did not result in sugar coating America’s crudity. In chapter 5
of The Great American Novel (1923), for instance, he discusses the in-
fluence of Kandinsky and Expressionism. The speaker describes this
movement as ‘‘a fine thing. It is THE thing for the moment—in Eu-
rope’’ (1970, 173). Of course, in America, the speaker acknowledges a
difference—it is ‘‘reversed’’ and has a ‘‘water attachment to be released
with a button. That IS art.’’ This discussion gets more heated as the
speaker gets attacked for what he knows about European conscious-
ness and American art: ‘‘Really you are too naı̈ve’’ (1970, 174). The
speaker then retorts, ‘‘Europe is nothing to us.’’ Despite preferring
America, he is under no illusions about the state of its culture—‘‘we
have no art, no manners, no intellect—we have nothing’’ (175). Yet,
instead of deferring to European supremacy, he embraces his identity:
‘‘I am an American. A United Stateser. Yes, it’s ugly, there is no word
to say it better’’ (175).
Frank O’Hara echoed Williams’s cultural charge: ‘‘there is more
sheer ugliness in America than you can shake a stick at’’ (1983, 98). As
a poet writing almost thirty years later in 1959, he understood the
need to acknowledge this ‘‘ugliness’’ in relation to the production of
American art: ‘‘it is the characteristic of the avant-garde to absorb and
transform disparate qualities not normally associated with art, for the
artist to take within him the violence and evil of his times and come
out with something’’ (98). Considering the time frame of O’Hara’s
observation, one not only thinks of the accomplishment of the Ab-
stract Expressionists, but of Williams’s Paterson, a work that encapsu-
lates such ‘‘disparate qualities’’ inherent in the American locale and
transforms them into poetry. Further along in Stein’s reading of the
antiliterary in O’Hara, he places the New York poet in an Emerson
tradition: ‘‘. . . for he takes Emerson’s insistence on the primacy of
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experience and uses it as a cornerstone of his aesthetics. As with Emer-

son, what one sees and what one does matters to O’Hara. But while
Emerson believed that some version of personal truth would issue
from such attention, O’Hara is less sure of the results and more con-
cerned with the action as a reward in itself’’ (1990, 362). Stein’s read-
ing aligns O’Hara with an influential American precursor, one also
important to Williams. On the surface, this may seem odd—neither
Williams nor O’Hara come across as devotees of American Transcen-
dentalism. Yet both men fulfill Emerson’s call for poetic originality
and attentiveness to the everyday. In the next chapter, more time and
space will be devoted to working out the ways that these Emersonian
principles factor into the poet’s response to Abstract Expressionism.
At this point, though, it is enough to acknowledge that in their own
ways O’Hara and Williams extend into the modern era Emerson’s em-
phasis on perception, action, and experience.
Before delving further into their poetic connections, it is necessary
to relate how O’Hara discovered Williams. In 1946 following his ser-
vice in the Navy, O’Hara entered Harvard on the G.I. Bill. Upon his
initial enrollment, he viewed himself as an aspiring composer and pi-
anist. By the time he graduated in 1950, he viewed himself as a poet.
For good reason, O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch has emphasized
the importance to O’Hara of Joyce and the French poets. Yet O’Hara’s
purchase of Williams’s Complete Poems at Grolier’s in 1946 also sug-
gests the emerging influence of an American precursor during this for-
mative period (Gooch 1993, 101). In her seminal work Poet among
Painters, Marjorie Perloff, in fact, accounts for Williams in her re-
markable synthesis of the converging influences upon O’Hara during
these early years. She cites a letter received from Donald Allen telling
her how O’Hara claimed in the late 1950s that he was predominantly
reading Williams at the end of the 1940s (1998, 205).
At the same time O’Hara attended Harvard, the United States was
emerging as a political and cultural center. The war years had deci-
mated Paris and many other European cultural centers, leaving Amer-
ican painters an opening to take a lead role in the arts. As art historian
Serge Guilbaut argues, ‘‘Strong, victorious, and confident, America in
1945 could boast of increasing public interest in art, of media support
for the new enthusiasm, and of many willing artists, . . . as well as any
number of art historians and museums ready and willing to turn their
attention to the nation’s own art’’ (1983, 98). The same was true for
the poets. ‘‘Now the second phase of the revolution in the word was
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beginning to make itself felt,’’ Paul Mariani explains, ‘‘and this time it
was America that would take the lead’’ (1981, 519). Obviously Wil-
liams would play a key role in this phase of the poetic revolution, but
so, too, would O’Hara.
In light of his connection to Williams, O’Hara’s eventual promo-
tion of Abstract Expressionism parallels his own artistic desire to ex-
press the vibrancy and dynamism of the moment. Marjorie Perloff
notes that O’Hara’s love for ‘‘the motion picture, action painting, and
all forms of dance’’ relate to his love for ‘‘art forms that capture the
present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor’’
(1998, 21). In Spring and All, Williams places a similar emphasis on
the present: ‘‘When in the condition of imaginative suspense only will
the writing have reality . . . Not to attempt, at that time, to set values
on the word being used . . . but to write down that which happens at
that time’’ (1986, 206). Such an emphasis on this action-oriented
poetry, one rooted in the present moment, offers a key into O’Hara’s
responsiveness to Williams in postwar America. It also suggests a
broader connection to Emerson’s call for American poets to express
such present-ness and move beyond staid traditional forms.
Williams’s Early Influence on O’Hara
With these initial associations set forth, I want to offer a closer ex-
amination of O’Hara’s early poems, specifically those aligned with
Williams’s style. ‘‘Autobiographia Literaria,’’ written between 1949
and 1950, evokes Williams’s early verse; Perloff associates it with the
four-line stanzas of ‘‘The Catholic Bells’’ and ‘‘The Last Words of my
English Grandmother’’ (1998, 45). Yet the poem also evokes Wil-
liams’s ‘‘Pastoral’’ (‘‘When I was younger’’). O’Hara’s poem begins,
When I was a child

I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.
(1995, 11)
In each poem, the speaker recounts his struggle for poetic self-defini-
tion, assuming the classic romantic pose of an older person recalling
younger days. Williams’s speaker feels alienated as a result of his par-
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ticular perspective on the world. Toward the close of the poem, he

frames this isolation in cultural terms: ‘‘No one / will believe this / of
vast import to the nation’’ (1986, 65). For O’Hara, there are no cul-
tural consequences to his isolation; however, he does feel disconnected
and declares, ‘‘I am an orphan’’ (1995, 11). Ultimately both speakers
define themselves through their poetic roles. O’Hara rejoices in the
fact:
And here I am, the

center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
The series of exclamations accentuates a speaker reveling in his cre-

ative role. Williams’s ending obviously lacks the same unbridled en-
thusiasm. Yet Williams’s closing assertion is noteworthy. In his
despondence, the speaker implies that what he has seen and written
does have value. Even if America is ‘‘a mass of pulp’’ he later writes in
The Great American Novel, it requires an art of its own, ‘‘broken off
from the European mass’’ (1970, 175).
Another significant early poem by O’Hara is ‘‘Memorial Day,
1950.’’ It is often interpreted as a farewell poem. According to David
Lehman, it ‘‘is a memorial for his childhood as well as his recently
deceased father’’ (1998, 180–81). Yet the poem corresponds to Wil-
liams’s notion from poem XV in Spring and All that ‘‘destruction and
creation / are simultaneous’’ (1970, 127). It is not solely about the end,
but about the emergence of a new perspective on modernity. O’Hara’s
poem pays homage to the artists who have helped to shape this mod-
ern perspective. The poem, in fact, opens by invoking Picasso, the art-
ist who made him ‘‘tough and quick’’ (1995, 17). O’Hara later
mentions Picasso’s famous Guernica. The speaker claims that the
painting’s images of slaughter and brutality ultimately ‘‘hollered look
out!’’ Picasso’s art emboldened the young speaker to push beyond the
boundaries of traditional expression—whatever its consequences.
The speaker expresses his understanding of the older generation’s
destructiveness. ‘‘I / wasn’t surprised,’’ the speaker relates, ‘‘when the
older people entered / my cheap hotel room and broke my guitar and
my can / of blue paint’’ (1995, 17). With this destructive force bearing
down upon him and threatening his self-expression, he must turn to
alternative methods of creation. In stanza four, he states
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At that time all of us began to think

with our bare hands and even with blood all over
them, we knew vertical from horizontal, we never
smeared anything except to find out how it lived.
(17)
The final line evokes a Pollock-like process of discovering a painting’s

viability. As Perloff points out, ‘‘This elliptical statement is an impor-
tant reference to the doctrine of Action Painting (and, by implication,
Action Poetry)—the belief that the materials used by the artist exist in
their own right; they are not merely means to the creation of mimetic
illusion’’ (1998, 50). Such a critical comment regarding the nature of
Action Poetry/Action Painting offers a key for understanding the
O’Hara and Williams’s connection, particularly as it relates to such an
imaginative use of materials.
In stanza six, O’Hara seems to even invoke Williams when he de-
clares: ‘‘Poetry is as useful as a machine!’’ (1995, 18). The line echoes
the introduction to The Wedge (1944) where Williams argues against
the reductive notion that all art is an expression of the creator’s ‘‘frus-
tration.’’ Instead he makes, what he describes, as ‘‘two bald state-
ments’’: ‘‘There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem
is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s noth-
ing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in
any other machine, that is redundant’’ (1988, 54). O’Hara’s exclama-
tory declaration reinforces Williams’s idea—‘‘Memorial Day’’ is not a
sentimental look back or a therapy session gone awry. Rather, it is a
poem constructed to offer a linguistic, imaginative expression of this
particular day—Memorial Day, 1950.
The poem, in fact, concludes by portraying an artist who constructs
his own unique space informed but not overshadowed by the ideas and
examples of others. The poet’s ultimate transformation, as evident in
the final stanza, again offers intriguing echoes of Williams. The singer
no longer requires a piano to sing his songs. He has recovered from
the destructiveness of ‘‘the older people,’’ making use of his guitar
strings to ‘‘hold up pictures’’ and acknowledges that ‘‘naming’’ things
functions as a preliminary step in a process to ‘‘make things’’ (1995,
18). David Lehman sees such an assertion as ‘‘fascinating’’ and ‘‘per-
plexing,’’ in part, because it seems to imply ‘‘a hierarchy between
poetry and a higher aesthetic activity, making’’ associated with the vi-
sual artists of the day (1998, 184). Yet, it is not a given that O’Hara
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accords the visual artists this privileged position. After all, as Williams
states in his introduction to The Wedge, ‘‘When a man makes a poem,
makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about
him and composes them—without distortion which would mar their
exact significances—into an intense expression of his perceptions and
ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses.
It isn’t what he says that counts as a work of art, it’s what he makes,
with such an intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic
movement of its own to verify its authenticity’’ (1988, 54). That proc-
ess of ‘‘making’’ and ‘‘revelation’’ parallels O’Hara’s poem. For Wil-
liams, it is in such artistic making that a poem achieves authenticity,
originality, and ultimately offers revelatory possibilities. In ‘‘Memorial
Day,’’ this revelation seems to come from what O’Hara’s dead father
has learned:
. . . Now
my father is dead and has found out you must look things
in the belly, not in the eye. If only he had listened
to the men who made us, hollering like stuck pigs!
(1995, 18)
Strikingly, O’Hara’s ‘‘belly’’ image evokes Williams’s ‘‘The Right of

Way’’ where a ‘‘man’s belly’’ becomes the focal point of a young boy’s
gaze. For Williams, there is ‘‘supreme importance’’ to this ‘‘nameless
spectacle’’ (1986, 206). Williams recreates the moment in verse but
pulls back from explicating its larger relevance. O’Hara, too, refuses
to explicate, choosing instead to underscore his dead father’s altered
perspective, one that could have been averted if only he had listened
better to artists (presumably like Picasso) whose art had ‘‘hollered look
out!’’
Williams’s ‘‘Pastoral’’ and ‘‘The Right of Way’’ also offer a bridge
to another O’Hara poem, ‘‘A Walk on Sunday Afternoon.’’ Despite
its different locale (Boston, not New York), this poem functions as a
precursor to O’Hara’s later ‘‘I do this, I do that’’ poems that detail
walks through city streets yielding greater insight to life. In these
poems, attentiveness to the moment is emphasized. They do not sim-
ply record remembrances, but they recreate for readers the freshness
and vibrancy inherent in a moment. Such a perspective seems rooted
in Emersonian thought. In ‘‘Circles,’’ for instance, Emerson writes
that ‘‘[i]n nature, every moment is new; the past is always swallowed
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and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life,
transition, the energizing spirit’’ (2001, 237). In the best of Williams’s
and O’Hara’s poetry of the moment, we can experience this ‘‘energiz-
ing spirit’’ in the careful attention given to the movement and newness
of each instant.
‘‘A Walk on Sunday Afternoon’’ actually begins with the movement
of gulls that ‘‘wheeled / several miles away’’ (1995, 20). Their depar-
ture, in turn, draws the speaker’s eyes to the details of his locale: ‘‘the
bridge, which / stood on the wet-barked / trees, was broad and cold’’
(1995, 20). Besides these natural images, the speaker recounts a walk
with a friend, George Montgomery (Gooch 1993, 161), along portions
of the famed ‘‘Freedom Trail’’ in Boston. The two men stroll around
Bunker Hill and travel by the Navy yard site to see the U.S.S. Consti-
tution. Unlike the later ‘‘I do this, I do that’’ poems, O’Hara uses
shorter, more compact lines, reminiscent of Williams’s early verse.
Yet, like his later ‘‘I do this, I do that’’ poems, O’Hara’s speaker re-
counts specific details of his walk:
. . . Outside the gate

some children jumped
higher and higher off
the highway embankment.
Cars honked. Leaves
on trees shook. And
above us the elevated
trolley trundled along.
(1995, 21)
Here O’Hara blends together nature images, traffic noises, and chil-
dren’s play in a manner reminiscent of Williams’s ‘‘View of A Lake.’’
Children dare one another into dangerous but thrilling jumps amid a
backdrop of daily constants—cars, trolleys, and rustling leaves. The
drama of these jumps ultimately leads to the prophetic conclusion:
‘‘Tomorrow, / probably, our country / will declare war.’’ In this casual
tone the speaker, who has been visiting the landmarks of an earlier
war, seems to allude to an impending war in Korea. Ironically
O’Hara’s early action poem recounts the types of action tied not only
to America’s Revolutionary origins but also to its continuing self-
definition as a postwar military power.
Like Williams before him, O’Hara creates a poetry very much in
tune with the pace and rhythm of the streets. He comes into imagina-
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tive contact with what he sees and hears and expresses it in what Wil-
liams might consider ‘‘a language of the day.’’ In Kora in Hell,
Williams describes it as, ‘‘That which is heard from the lips of those to
whom we are talking in our day’s-affairs mingles with what we see in the
streets and everywhere about us as it mingles also with our imaginations. By
this chemistry is fabricated a language of the day which shifts and reveals its
meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send down rain or
snow or hail. This is the language to which few ears are tuned . . . Nowadays
the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of
the listener and of the poet are left free to mingle in the dance’’ (1970, 59).
Williams’s lines express to me what O’Hara accomplishes in so many
of his street poems. His acute sensitivity to the sights and sounds of
the streets invite readers into an imaginative and revelatory experi-
ence. As with Williams, the key for establishing this rapport resides in
the poet’s use of language. In his well-known essay ‘‘Personism,’’
O’Hara recounts his discovery of this principle: ‘‘I went back to work
and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realiz-
ing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the
poem, and so Personism was born. . . . It puts the poem squarely be-
tween the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is
correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons
instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death
of literature as we know it’’ (1995, 499). For O’Hara, it seems, famil-
iarity in language offers the poet and reader a chance for greater inti-
macy with one another.
Robert Duncan offers an especially perceptive reading of what
O’Hara is saying here. As Robert Creeley recounts, Duncan ‘‘noted
that extraordinary poet’s attempt ‘to keep the demand on the language
as operative, so that something was at issue all the time, and, at the
same time, to make it almost like chatter on the telephone that nobody
was going to pay attention to before . . . that the language gain what
was assumed before to be its trivial uses. . . . So I think that one can
build a picture, that in all the arts, especially in America, they are oper-
ative. We think of art as doing something, taking hold of it as a pro-
cess’ ’’ (1989, 369–70).
Duncan’s interpretation is quite illuminating. For him, O’Hara’s at-
tentiveness to what some may perceive as triviality actually results in
an operative language. Michael Magee, who first brought Duncan’s
commentary to my attention in Emancipating Pragmatism, correlates
this idea to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. In this work, Dewey de-
................. 17540$ $CH1 12-08-09 13:39:45 PS PAGE 36

scribes the ‘‘opaque’’ meaning that results when art objects are re-
moved from their ‘‘origins and operations in experience’’ (2004, 138), as
well as the meaning of those efforts to produce art ‘‘and the everyday
events, doings’’ (139). As Magee asserts, ‘‘If on the one hand the poem
separated from ‘operations in experience’ is rendered opaque, then,
conversely, the poem grounded in such operations (as ‘event,’ as
‘doing’) is endlessly significant; it is set in unanticipated motion as a
process that is ‘doing something’ for the poet and his readers. This
latter possibility is what Duncan means when he discusses O’Hara’s
‘demand’ that the language be ‘operative’ ’’ (2004, 139). Magees’s com-
mentary also seems applicable to Williams’s use of language, especially
in light of his commentary in Kora in Hell about ‘‘the language of the
day.’’ Whether as a ‘‘dance’’ or in ‘‘Lucky Pierre Style,’’ both poets
sought to create poems that made genuine contact with their imagined
readers. Through attentiveness to the ever-changing nature of lan-
guage, each man discovered memorable ways to communicate the sig-
nification and imaginative possibilities available in even the most
mundane daily occurrences.
‘‘Today’’ offers yet another example of Williams’s influence on
O’Hara’s early verse. It does so through its emphasis on the ‘‘things’’
that form the poem. The speaker expresses emphatic enthusiasm for
things—natural and manmade, ordinary and extraordinary—that sur-
round him.
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!

You really are beautiful! Pearls,
harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
the stuff they’ve always talked about
still makes a poem a surprise!

These things are with us every day
even on the beachheads and biers. They
do have meaning. They’re strong as rocks.
(1995, 15)
The speaker’s celebration of these things clearly places O’Hara in

Williams’s camp. Anthony Libby describes it as a bizarre restatement
of the ‘‘ ‘Red Wheelbarrow’ theme’’ (1990, 133). While some of these
‘‘things’’ may not be found in Williams’s verse, as John Lowney points
out (1997, 112), they do represent O’Hara’s creative interpretation of
the things that Williams’s credo calls upon poets to use to make ‘‘the
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poem a surprise.’’ Lowney’s reading also points out O’Hara’s impor-

tant affirmation: ‘‘The poem affirms the meaning of things, but refuses
to impose a recognizable order on them.’’ In this way, in the tradition
of Whitman and Williams, O’Hara achieves an egalitarian representa-
tion of these things.
As Lowney further notes, the poem’s closing rock reference alludes
to ‘‘A Sort of a Song,’’ a poem appearing in Williams’s The Wedge. In
that poem, Williams advocates for a writing made-up of ‘‘sleepless’’
words. As he writes,
—through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
(1988, 55)
By equating the ‘‘things’’ ranging from jujubes to pearls with ‘‘rocks,’’

O’Hara’s poem illustrates the creative possibilities inherent in Wil-
liams’s dictum. Williams charges poets not only to arrange or com-
pose, but also to be imaginative and ‘‘Invent!’’ The saxifrage flower—a
plant that grows in rock crevices and literally means rock breaking—
functions as this metaphorical creative act. O’Hara’s assertion at the
conclusion of his poem—‘‘They’re strong as rocks’’ (1995, 15)—
points out the potential value intrinsic in such ‘‘stuff’’; it just awaits
the right imaginative splitting power to express something new.
O’Hara’s ‘‘Christmas Card to Grace Hartigan’’ echoes another
well-known poem from Williams’s The Wedge, ‘‘Burning the Christ-
mas Greens.’’ Williams’s commentary describes his poem as envisag-
ing ‘‘a rebirth of the ‘state’ perhaps but certainly of the mind following
the destruction of the shibboleths of tradition which often comfort it’’
(1988, 461). Williams’s poem literally describes a gathering of holly,
balsam, and hemlock to decorate the home and then the burning of it
all following the holiday season—‘‘Their time past, / relief!’’ (1988,
63). O’Hara’s poem, not surprisingly set in his city environ, lacks a
trek into the woods and the placement of decorative holly.
Like Williams, though, O’Hara emphasizes the colors red and
green traditionally associated with Christmas. For Williams’s speaker,
there is something attractive about the green of the holly. It offers
protection and security at a time when all else seems lifeless and cold.
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For him, ‘‘Green is a solace / a promise of peace, a fort / against the

cold’’ (1988, 64). It’s also the place where ‘‘small birds hide and
dodge / and lift their plaintive / rallying cries.’’ For O’Hara’s speaker,
the color green is tied directly to its traditional connotations. He de-
scribes Christmas as ‘‘green and general / like all great works of the /
imagination’’ (1995, 212). This generality has its origins ‘‘from
minute / private sentiments in the desert.’’
For both poets, this green contrasts with red. In Williams’s poem, a
red fire consumes and transforms the holly. He describes it as ‘‘a living
red, / flame red, red as blood wakes / on the ash’’ (1988, 63). O’Hara,
too, emphasizes this color. In the third stanza, he echoes Williams’s
correlation of red and blood: ‘‘For red there is our blood’’ (1995, 212).
O’Hara’s speaker wants this redness—this active life-giving agent—
maintained: it ‘‘must be / protected from spilling into generality by
secret meanings.’’ He fears this sense of generality, a quality he pre-
viously correlated with Christmas, because it masks the intimacy and
immediacy he values.
In Williams’s poem, the branches from the green trees gathered at
the darkest of moments, ‘‘winter’s midnight,’’ initially filled such a
‘‘need’’ (1988, 63). After decorating the house with this ‘‘living green,’’
all ‘‘seemed gentle and good / to us.’’ Yet this illusory comfort is short-
lived. The passing of time and the Christmas season ultimately reveals
the illusion. It is then that the speaker and his companion attempt to
destroy the greens. Upon their initial burning, the speaker confesses,
‘‘our eyes recoiled from it’’ (64). Yet through the flames the green
turns to red—it is ‘‘instant and alive.’’ Consequently the speaker per-
ceives that the burning is transformative and restorative. There is
something purgative through the process of destruction—as green
transforms to red and then ultimately to white:
an infant landscape of shimmering
ash and flame and we, in
that instant, lost,
breathless to be witnesses,
as if we stood
ourselves refreshed among
the shining fauna of that fire.
(1988, 64–65)
Through the process of destruction, the speaker and his companion

are renewed in the moment and its possibilities for creation.
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O’Hara’s final stanza draws heavily upon the same notion of burn-
ing that permeates Williams’s poem. It begins,
Christmas is the time of cold air

and loud parties and big expense,
but in our hearts flames flicker
answeringly, as on old-fashioned
trees. I would rather the house
burn down than our flames go out.
(1995, 212)
Here O’Hara juxtaposes common associations of Christmas—cold

weather, parties, and presents—with something he finds more inti-
mate and real—his relationship with Grace Hartigan. Their burning
hearts feed ‘‘on old-fashioned trees.’’ Moreover, he would prefer the
destruction of fixed structures—‘‘the house’’—to the extinguishing of
this generative life-giving flame.
Referencing Williams
Besides these numerous allusions to Williams’s verse, O’Hara also

directly references the Rutherford doctor in his poetry. For starters,
in June, 1952, O’Hara wrote the Dada-like poem ‘‘What Sledgeham-
mer? Or W.C. Williams’s Been Attacked!’’ On a first reading the
poem appears playful and nonsensical. Benjamin Sloan argues that it
counters Williams’s ‘‘clean, purely pared poems’’ (1990, 73). He
claims that in the first two stanzas ‘‘O’Hara gives Williams another
knock on the head.’’ Instead of attacking Williams, though, O’Hara’s
poem in fact functions as a defense. The title actually references Jo-
seph Bennett’s article on Williams in the 1952 summer issue of the
Hudson Review entitled ‘‘The Lyre and the Sledgehammer.’’ In this ar-
ticle, Bennett systematically takes Williams apart as a poet. He de-
scribes him as ‘‘intensely self-preoccupied, entranced with the image
of his own ego’’ (1980, 263). He sees Williams’s description as ‘‘a
childish pleasure in the gruesome for gruesomeness’ sake’’ (264). He
condemns Williams’s efforts at profundity and serious verse. He as-
serts, ‘‘To hammer against the major anvils requires intelligence, ra-
tional discrimination, dramatic skill, psychological acuity, and
emotional subtlety—especially intelligence. And patience and care.
These qualities simply do not form a part of Williams’ poetic equip-
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ment’’ (271). Bennett struggles in his piece for something positive to

say about Williams’s poetics, clearly preferring his early cultivation of
‘‘images, sounds, colours and textures’’ (271). He equates him with
Sandburg, although Williams ‘‘has a better ear and uses a more subtle
and evolved technique.’’
In this light, O’Hara’s poem functions as a counter to Bennett’s es-
timation of Williams’s work. In classic O’Hara fashion, his speaker
opens with an account of his afternoon walk, albeit one taken before-
hand that curiously involves a tiglon:
Yester the heat I walked my tiglon ‘‘Charles F’’

around the Park, as three nuns in a stationwagon
(au Zoo) robbed the Elizabeth Arden Building.
In the University pistols were not shot off
because they aren’t ‘‘clean precise expression.’’ Ho

ho, ho, kra, chuh, chuh, tssk, tssk, tssk, tereu. . . .
(1996, 80)
Like the later ‘‘I do this, I do that’’ poems, O’Hara’s speaker refer-
ences specific New York landmarks like the Elizabeth Arden building.
Yet he also summons the surreal image of nuns robbing it. He juxta-
poses this rebellious act with the ineptitude and inaction of the univer-
sity, a place where nothing gets fired-off because of the demand for
‘‘clean precise expression.’’ O’Hara then contrasts this demand with
what appears to be a nonsensical collection of sounds. Yet the juxtapo-
sition of this demand with these sounds offers another link to Wil-
liams. To appreciate this connection, it’s helpful to turn again to
Bennett’s article. At one point, he ridicules Williams’s ‘‘anti-intellec-
tual attitude,’’ which he describes as ‘‘puerile’’: ‘‘The dreary, repeated
attack on the university throughout his work amounts to phobia in
‘Paterson,’ with the hammering repetition of its motto ‘No ideas
but in things.’ It reveals a pompous, bigoted mind, not merely anti-
intellectual in attitude, but dedicated to the principle of non-intelli-
gence’’ (1980, 265).
O’Hara would no doubt find such a charge against Williams insult-
ing. His poem thus functions as a sharp rejoinder. According to Mar-
jorie Perloff, it ‘‘is obviously an attack on the school of Eliot and the
New Critical orthodoxy that made ‘The Waste Land’ with its scenes
of Philomela’s rape (‘tereu’) its sacred text’’ (1998, 45). Such a reading
makes sense, especially considering Bennett’s article and Williams’s
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long opposition to Eliot’s poetics. The irony of the university’s de-

mand for ‘‘clean precise expression,’’ with the almost nonsensical ref-
erence to Eliot, a poet embraced by the academy, suggests what
universities have missed when it comes to appreciating Williams’s
verse.
The poem concludes with the announcement of a monstrous wed-
ding—one that pairs ‘‘Metatheosophists with Italian bedbugs / swing-
ing from their woolly nipples and The Hudson Review / (that Organ)’’
(1996, 80). O’Hara’s disdain for the Hudson Review is clearly evident
through his monstrous and grotesque imagery, somewhat reminiscent
of Bennett’s disgust with Williams’s image of a bedbug crawling about
‘‘a coloured boy’s eardrum’’ (1980, 270). Only ‘‘Boola-boola,’’ a refer-
ence to a Yale fight song, gets an invite to this monstrous affair. Coin-
cidently the composer Morton Feldman, O’Hara’s close friend, later
wrote an essay entitled ‘‘Boola Boola’’ (1966) that railed at academia
for its self-perpetuating system of music teachers rather than original
musicians. Concerning O’Hara’s poem, it is this crowd that the
speaker claims ‘‘paints ‘Elegance a Thoroughfare / to Yellow Drawers,
the Commonwealth of Closed Cavities’ / on the Town (get it?) Line’’
(1996, 80). Although it is uncertain exactly what there is to get, such a
pairing marks boundary lines. The poem ends with a statement of the
day and the speaker’s sense of his poem: ‘‘Indian afternoon. my dirty.’’
Despite the poem’s obfuscation, it offers an intriguing marker of
O’Hara’s literary allegiance. Upon reading Bennett’s scathing critique
of Williams, O’Hara answered back.
‘‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’’ offers a further impression of
O’Hara’s Williams. He wrote it on the occasion of a party the famed
painter held in honor of Jane Freilicher’s pending marriage to Joe
Hazan. Freilicher and O’Hara were close friends. In the poem,
O’Hara takes on a heraldic role: ‘‘I’m sort of the bugle, / like waking
people up, of your peculiar desire to get married’’ (1995, 265). O’Hara
then playfully focuses on its ‘‘newness.’’
It’s so
original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic
bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian!
it’s definitely not 19th Century, it’s not even Partisan Review, it’s
new, it must be vanguard!
(265)
Despite the teasing tone, O’Hara’s reference to Williams amid this

grouping reflects certain qualities associated with the older poet, both
................. 17540$ $CH1 12-08-09 13:39:49 PS
PAGE 42
in terms of originality and in terms of what Wallace Stevens might

describe as the ‘‘anti-poetic’’ (1980, 125). Yet, even in his playful tone,
as he denies what ‘‘it’s definitely not,’’ he does ascribe it as new, and
tangentially describes Williams as a man identified at the ‘‘vanguard’’
of newness. For O’Hara, Williams represented that break from the
past and an American poet of real originality.
While O’Hara was certainly influenced by Williams, he was not one
to mimic or imitate, to become merely another one of what he called
the ‘‘WC Williams-ites’’ (Perloff 1998, 45). This determination to
forge his identity comes across in ‘‘To a Poet.’’ O’Hara’s poem opens
with the following declaration:
I am sober and industrious

and would be plain and plainer
for a little while
until my rococo
self is more assured of its
distinction.
(1995, 185)
The speaker, with a ‘‘rococo / self’’ reminiscent of Williams’s poet in

‘‘The Wanderer,’’ seeks his own distinction apart from poetic prede-
cessors. In this apostrophe, the speaker references the creation of
‘‘new verses’’ that break from earlier verses that ‘‘brood over an
orderly / childhood’’ (1995, 185). In later lines, he directly reverses
Williams’s well-known dictum ‘‘No ideas but in things.’’ His revised
line appears, ‘‘and when the doctor comes to me / he says ‘No things
but in ideas.’ ’’ At first glance, such a line rejects Williams’s famous
credo. Perloff does note that in his lecture on ‘‘The New Poets’’ at
The Club in 1952, O’Hara warns of the dangers of following too
closely to the Rutherford doctor. He refers to such poets as ‘‘WC Wil-
liams-ites’’ who assert their identity as, ‘‘I am the man your father was
Americanism’’ and cultivate a cult of the ‘‘He-Man’’ (1998, 45). His
reversal of the Williams dictum therefore enables O’Hara to create
the space needed to be his own poet and not merely another of Wil-
liams’s imitations—something Williams, in fact, would have encour-
aged. The poem concludes by suggesting that these lines may have
been ‘‘overheard / in the public / square, now that I am off my couch’’
(1995, 185). Whether heard privately or publicly is of no matter,
though. The utterance has enabled him to get off the couch and be-
come an active and original speaker.
................. 17540$ $CH1 12-08-09 13:39:50 PS
PAGE 43
O’Hara was clearly conscious of his own imitative tendencies. He

sent ‘‘Heroic Sculpture’’ to John Ashbery on October 10, 1958, for
what he described as ‘‘a Larry Rivers ‘stone’ in our the-worst-in-
lithography book’’ (Allen Collection). Immediately following the
poem he asks, ‘‘Not much for a grown poet, is it?’’ He then casually
moves on in the letter to suggest a meeting between Ashbery and
Waldo Rasmussen. His uncertainty about the poem, however, creeps
back into the letter—‘‘In ref above pome [sic] do you think I’m getting
too William-Carlos—Williams—out-of-Scève? I hate purity.’’ The
reference to the monstrous conjoining of the sixteenth-century
French poet and Williams suggests a fear of his own imitative tenden-
cies, as well as his own struggle to resist a perceived ‘‘purity’’ that he
felt Williams’s prose conveyed.
To varying degrees, the preceding discussion illustrates Williams’s
stylistic influence upon O’Hara’s poetry. Marjorie Perloff is right to
point out that O’Hara’s ‘‘debt to Williams . . . is less to the complex
epic poem Paterson than to the Dadaesque prose poems of Kora, and
especially the early shorter poems’’ (1998, 45). In regard to Kora in
Hell, an early experimental work that moves beyond staid traditional
forms, O’Hara wrote to his friend Jasper Johns that it is ‘‘very good,
interesting because very early and ambitious’’ (45). His mention of this
improvisational prose poem shows an attraction to Williams’s experi-
ments with form and language. As Perloff argues, this work, along
with Williams’s earlier short poems, influenced O’Hara’s short lines,
line breaks, and colloquial language (45). ‘‘From the first,’’ according
to Perloff, ‘‘he accepted Williams as a master, no doubt because he
identified with Williams’s struggle against convention, pretentious-
ness, conformity—the ‘going thing’ ’’ (44).
Yet, for this study, it is important to point out that O’Hara still finds
Williams a relevant poet throughout the 1950s. In his famous mock
manifesto ‘‘Personism’’ (1959), O’Hara, in fact, declares Williams to
be the only living American poet better than the movies. From review-
ing his correspondence, his enjoyment of Williams seems to span the
doctor’s career. In that same letter to Johns that lauds Kora in Hell, he
writes: ‘‘You said you liked PATERSON; all the books of WCW have
great great great things in them. I don’t believe he ever wrote an unin-
teresting poem’’ (Perloff 1998, 45). In another letter to his good friend
Jane Freilicher, he playfully adopts the role of Williams in their close
relationship: ‘‘Just call me Doc Williams and you’seff Flo.’’4 In a dif-
ferent letter to Feilicher dated June 6, 1951, he shares his enjoyment
................. 17540$ $CH1 12-08-09 13:39:51 PS PAGE 44

in reading Paterson—Book IV: ‘‘I have just bought Paterson 4 which is

so far incomparably lucid and beautiful, my frontal lobes are awhirl’’
(1951b, Allen Collection). He then offers Freilicher an excerpt to ex-
plain his reaction:
The gulls, vortices of despair, circle and give

voice to their wild responses until the thing
is gone . then, ravening, having scattered
to survive, close again upon the focus,
the bare stones, three harbor stones, except
for that . useless
unprofaned
O’Hara’s selection comes from section 1 of Paterson IV, specifically

lines that begin what Williams’s poetic persona Corydon calls ‘‘Cory-
don, a Pastoral’’ (1992, 160). In her recital of the poem to her friend
Phyllis, she skips the presumably pastoral references to ‘‘rocks and
sheep’’ and starts instead with the disruptive presence of a search heli-
copter upon a flock of gulls. In his letter, O’Hara doesn’t quote Cory-
don’s critical self-appraisal—‘‘It stinks!’’ (161). Such criticism emerges
in part because the poem lacks metrical regularity. Cordyon goes on,
If this were rhyme, Sweetheart

such rhyme as might be made
jaws would hang open .
But the measure of it is the thing . None

can wish for an embellishment
and keep his mind lean,
fit for action .
such action as I plan
(161)
As previously noted, the lines O’Hara quotes to Freilicher do not in-

clude Corydon’s critique. This critique, however, offers insight into
what O’Hara may have found appealing about the poem, specifically
its break from rhyme and metrical regularity. In his letter to Frei-
licher, he remarks about the excerpt: ‘‘Aint that sumptuous’’ (1951b,
Allen Collection). He then asserts, ‘‘I hate people like Reed Whittem-
ore who think this is composition by imitation, I think they jes don’t
know nuffin bout metric as our old massah Ezzard Pound taught um
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it.’’ In defending Williams, O’Hara refutes the sense that Williams of-
fers a mere imitation of Pound. For O’Hara, it is Williams’s original-
ity, particularly in terms of metrics, that is so appealing.
As mentioned earlier, O’Hara corresponded with Johns in 1959
about Paterson. Later letters suggest that O’Hara continued to hold
Williams in high regard. In correspondence dated December 7, 1961,
he tells Ashbery about his recent interview with researchers from Time
and the Brinkley Report: ‘‘I did put in lots of plugs for your Tennis
Court Oats, on the order of, ‘But dears, after William Carlos Williams
and Pierre Reverdy (Would you mind spelling the last name?—
researchers, indeed!), what is there on either continent but Ashes?’ ’’
(1961b, Allen Collection). He wrote to Larry Rivers on October 29,
1962, about some books he sent to Steven Rivers for his library be-
cause it was ‘‘pretty dull and academic’’: ‘‘so I dished him up some
W.C. Williams, LeRoi Jones, Diane Di Prima, David Schubert, and
even Joel Oppenheimer and a couple of other very avant-garde look-
ing pamphlets which should keep the kids either burping or scorning
for a week or so.’’ Clearly Williams is the old man of this ‘‘avant-
garde’’ anti-academic group, yet he is also the first one mentioned.
O’Hara did struggle at times with his devotion to Williams’s writ-
ings, most notably his prose. He labored through Williams’s Autobiog-
raphy. In a February 11, 1956, letter to James Schulyer he writes, ‘‘I’ve
also been reading W C Williams’s autobiog and refuse to stop loving
him although he certainly is doing his best to discourage me’’ (Allen
Collection). A few days later, in a letter dated February 16, 1956, he
offers a more detailed assessment to his friend Mike Goldberg:
Did you read William Carlos Williams’ autobio? I love his poems, but the
book is oddly crotchety and contentious and provincial—what made me
get rather nervous was that it zoomed along he was keeping his equilib-
rium through the years by refusing to really admire anybody in this funny
Yankee way, without having any megalomaniac blind confidence in himself
and his work, which would have been understandable and possibly attrac-
tive (like, say, in Mayakovsky where you know he felt that all the other
poets were just plain WRONG and you like him for coming out with it
whether you agree or not), but Williams has this ‘‘show me’’ Puritanical
streak; which miraculously never appears in his poems. I’m not sure that
at the time things happened he didn’t feel genuine admirations and
thereby could advance and be stimulated, and then when he comes to write
this book so many years later he forgets them, now that he is sitting well
up the mountain. Or maybe I’m just complaining because you like to think
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someone you admire is like you in some way, and he isn’t. (Allen Collec-
tion)
O’Hara seems put-off by Williams’s lack of expressed ‘‘admirations’’

for others. In contrast, he outspokenly admired his friends, painters,
and fellow poets (including Williams). For him, it was a key for the
stimulation and advancement in his own work. He also perceives in
Williams a Yankee/Puritanical streak, which no doubt would have
driven Williams crazy, especially in light of his constant diatribes
against the Puritans. To O’Hara’s credit, though, he does give Wil-
liams the benefit of the doubt regarding his age. He concludes his
commentary with a humorous ultimatum about ‘‘Asphodel, That
Greeny Flower’’: ‘‘If the long poem in his new book of poems Journey
to Love isn’t great, I’m going to take up knitting’’ (Allen Collection).
All of this jaunty correspondence demonstrates O’Hara’s continu-
ing interest in Williams, notably in reference to the older poet’s rele-
vancy in the ongoing push toward the creation of the ‘‘new’’ in poetry.
O’Hara may not seek to write a long poem like Paterson; after all, it
had been done by Williams. However, Williams’s continuance as a
vital working presence seems inspiring to a younger poet continuing
to carve out his own unique space as a contemporary American poet.
Bridging the Gap between Williams and O’Hara
An intriguing link between the two poets is Donald Allen and his
seminal anthology The New American Poetry (1960). Allen is the editor
of O’Hara’s Complete Poems, as well as several other O’Hara collec-
tions. Furthermore, his important anthology of ‘‘third-generation’’
poets published by Grove Press offers one of the earliest critical con-
nections between the two poets. In this anthology, Allen divides con-
temporary poets into five groups: Origin/Black Mountain Review, San
Francisco Renaissance, Beat Generation, New York School, and what
Allen describes to Williams in a letter dated December 23, 1959, as a
‘‘variety of poets who have appeared to be developing their own style’’
(Williams Papers). Allen places the works of these poets in an exclu-
sively American context. He claims, ‘‘Through their work many are
closely allied to modern jazz and abstract expressionist painting, today
recognized throughout the world to be America’s greatest achieve-
ments in contemporary culture’’ (1960, xi). Such a reference, in the
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light of this study, reinforces the cultural importance of this artistic

movement to the poetry of the period.
The anthology includes several poems by O’Hara.5 Allen, in fact,
devotes thirty-one pages to O’Hara’s poetry; only Charles Olson’s
work appears on more pages (thirty-seven). He thanks O’Hara, as well
as Olson, Creeley, and Ginsberg, for what he describes as ‘‘solid sup-
port and encouragement without which I should not have been able
to complete this project’’ (1960, xiv). Also, Allen presents toward the
conclusion of the book several ‘‘Statements on Poetics,’’ including one
written by O’Hara. From the writings included in the ‘‘Statement of
Poetics,’’ O’Hara clearly influenced several poets of this younger gen-
eration. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and James Schuyler both reference
him in their statements; Kenneth Koch mentions him in his biograph-
ical note.
In his preface, Allen places his anthology in a postwar period that
he describes as ‘‘singularly rich’’ in American poetry. He describes it
as a vital, not static time in American poetry and records the accom-
plishments of the ‘‘older generation’’ (like Williams) and the ‘‘second
generation’’ (the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop). He specifically mentions
Williams’s later achievements: Paterson, The Desert Music and Other
Poems, and Journey to Love. He then directly links the younger genera-
tion of poets he has assembled to the Williams/Pound line: ‘‘Follow-
ing the practice and precepts of Ezra Pound and William Carlos
Williams, it has built on their achievements and gone on to evolve
new conceptions of the poem’’ (xi). Such references reflect Williams’s
import to Allen, as well as his perceived importance to poets like
O’Hara who appear in the anthology. ‘‘I stayed up last night reading
your anthology,’’ wrote O’Hara in a letter to Allen dated April 28,
1960, ‘‘and it is really a beautiful book. The preface is terrific, just
right, and the book as a whole is marvelous’’ (Allen Collection). For
Williams’s part, in a 1960 interview with Walter Sutton, he acknowl-
edged a link to the younger poets found in Allen’s anthology who were
‘‘following the same path’’ (1976, 39). Yet, Williams drew a distinc-
tion, ‘‘though they don’t know exactly, metrically, what they’re doing,
most of them. They have a tendency to call it free verse, but I object.’’
Clearly, as has been shown, O’Hara valued Williams’s poetry. It re-
mains much more difficult to ascertain Williams’s view of O’Hara. So
far, I have yet to discover any direct commentary by Williams regard-
ing O’Hara. Two of Williams’s correspondents—Denise Levertov and
Cid Corman—made disparaging references to O’Hara. In a Septem-
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ber 26, 1956, letter to Williams, Levertov describes O’Hara as part of

‘‘a little clique’’ with Ashbery and Koch who ‘‘aren’t much good I
think’’ (51). Corman’s reference to O’Hara, which appears in a letter
dated June 18, 1960, evaluates the current crop of younger poets. He
finds faults in all of the following: Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip
Whalen, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso,
Kenneth Koch, and O’Hara. He devotes the most space in his letter
to a critique of Koch and O’Hara: ‘‘O’Hara and Koch belong to the
spill school that must be related, I’m afraid to say, to the Freudian
couch. These people have studied all the psychiatric twists and have
all the sophisticated answers. They add up to nothing. O’Hara’s mut-
terings interest me not at all. It’s true, at their best in this vein, they
are good vaudevillians; they can amuse and entertain. But they will
gradually realize, maybe, that art, no more than dying, is not [h.w.] an
amusement—though it may, in passing, amuse’’ (Williams Papers).6
Corman’s letter, somewhat reminiscent of H. D.’s chastisement of
Williams referenced in ‘‘Prologue to Kora in Hell,’’ reflects his clear
disregard for O’Hara. It is unclear how Williams responded to Cor-
man’s assessment; however, Corman’s need to offer such a lengthy cri-
tique of O’Hara, suggests his competitiveness with the New York
poet. His letter is also noteworthy for his direct association of O’Hara
with Abstract Expressionism.
Considering Williams’s interest in so many of the young poets, it is
surprising that he does not discuss in any specific ways the writings of
Frank O’Hara. He certainly had the opportunity to encounter it
through The New American Poetry or the Evergreen Review. Williams’s
silence could be construed as rejection. Yet any reading of Williams’s
letters will tell you that he would not hold back critiquing or com-
menting upon any young poet he encountered. Throughout the
1950s, after all, he was writing to numerous young poets of his day,
including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Gregory Corso, and Robert
Creeley. According to James Breslin, ‘‘Unlike Pound, Williams bat-
tled with his own generation, but for his sons and daughters in the
following generations he was a tender, nurturing father who was
there’’ (1983, 15). Therefore his silence regarding O’Hara could be in-
terpreted as indifference. Had he read O’Hara, but was unmoved by
him? This also seems unlikely. After all, O’Hara’s place in Allen’s an-
thology would garner attention and prompt some sort of a response.
In conference talks about this subject, some have conjectured that
O’Hara’s homosexuality may have contributed to Williams’s silence.
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Although this point is worth considering, it seems to me that Williams

held close and supportive relationships with a number of gay painters
and poets, most notably Charles Demuth and Allen Ginsberg. There-
fore, it remains unclear to me why he remained silent about O’Hara.7
The other side of this story is O’Hara’s failure to contact Williams.
One has to wonder why this energetic and personable young poet,
who appeared outgoing and so much a part of the avant-garde
‘‘scene,’’ would not seek out a reputedly encouraging older poet, espe-
cially one that he held in such regard. Allen Ginsberg, a mutual friend
of both men, in fact suggested in a discussion with Robert Duncan
that ‘‘O’Hara had picked up on Williams because he saw Williams as
goodhearted’’ (1988, 63). In the end, it is a mystery why these two men
never directly sought each other out—whether to talk about poetry or
even the local painting scene.
Regardless of such direct evidence, I now want to turn from Wil-
liams and O’Hara’s connectedness to an examination of their re-
sponse to Abstract Expressionism, specifically focusing on the artists
Motherwell, Pollock, and Smith. Despite their differing positions as
outsider and insider to this group, both men appreciated the impor-
tance of this movement in the progression of American art. Besides an
adherence to the new, Williams and O’Hara share with these artists
an emphasis on spontaneity, immediacy, and action. By highlighting
Williams and O’Hara in this light, I intend to show what binds them
as poets, particularly in regard to the push for American originality
and creativity.
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2
‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’: Williams and
Abstract Expressionism
MANY STUDIES HAVE DEMONSTRATED THAT WILLIAM CARLOS WIL-

liams was influenced to a large degree by the early art movements of
the twentieth century. For instance, Bram Dijkstra and Henry Sayre
offer compelling studies that point to the extent of the plastic arts in-
fluence upon Williams. In The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech, Dijkstra
points out how Williams was influenced by an earlier assemblage of the
New York avant-garde led by Alfred Stieglitz and the exhibitions at 291
during the 1910s. ‘‘The picture of these years as a grey cultural age for
the majority of Americans may indeed be accurate,’’ he writes, ‘‘but for
a small circle of poets and writers in or near New York during those
years, the opposite was true. Williams was an enthusiastic and open-
eyed, if occasionally baffled, member of this group’’ (1969, 7). Williams
continued to see New York as an avant-garde center where ‘‘they do
meet’’ and ‘‘talk,’’ albeit ‘‘nothing is exchanged / unless that guff / can
be retranslated’’ (1988, 163). In ‘‘A Place (Any Place) To Transcend All
Places’’ (1948), a response to Wallace Stevens’s ‘‘Description Without
Place’’ (Mariani 1981, 517), he details the grotesqueness of this place
complete with its ‘‘tuberculin-tested herd’’ (Williams, 1988, 164). Yet
there is also a claim for what ‘‘we have,’’ which includes ‘‘Southern
writers’’ and ‘‘foreign / writers’’ (165). As Paul Mariani remarks, ‘‘New
York, for all its obscenity and abstraction, was still finally a place, and
as a place it could still nourish one’s roots, still nourish a poetic’’ (517).
Understandably, due to his limited contact with Abstract Expres-
sionism, his association with this movement has not garnered exhaus-
tive study. Yet it is the art movement during Williams’s lifetime that
signaled America’s emergence as the vital center of the avant-
garde—an occurrence that did not go unnoticed by the Rutherford
poet. To expand upon the larger cultural relevance of this movement
to Williams, it is necessary to examine his most sustained commentary
51
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about it—an address entitled ‘‘The American Spirit in Art,’’ which he

delivered on December 18, 1951, to the National Institute of Arts and
Letters. In his address, Williams links the various contemporary ex-
periments with abstraction to an Emersonian call for a distinct Ameri-
can art. In consideration of the ideas he expresses to the National
Institute, it is also necessary to examine his contact with several key
figures associated with the movement, most notably the painter Rob-
ert Motherwell and the art critic Harold Rosenberg. Both his address
and personal contacts make clear that Williams, although an outsider
to the nexus of the movement, was in tune with its avant-garde aspira-
tion for authentic newness.
Prior to making his address to the National Institute of Arts and
Letters, Williams had entertained the idea of resigning from the Insti-
tute. As he explained in a July 1951 letter to Edward Dahlberg,
though, he believed he might make a difference within this group:
‘‘the thing is, which would the better forward the cause of good writ-
ing: my staying in or my getting out?’’ (1951b, Edward Dahlberg Col-
lection). His decision to remain suggests his desire to reform
American writing from within rather than railing from without. In the
address that he ultimately delivered, he attempts to explain and defend
the development of abstraction in the visual arts. According to Paul
Mariani, Williams’s address was met with ‘‘catcalls and boos’’ (1981,
643). In a January 23, 1952, letter he wrote the following to Kenneth
Burke:
I damned near DIED reading my ten pages to the wolves. I could hear
them growling before I had got half way down the first page. I was nervous
enough as it was, I had not taken a cocktail thinking I’d keep my tongue
free, I didn’t eat what was on my plate, but as the pressure mounted my
old heart began to torment itself until it was a painful lump in my chest. I
had to grit my teeth and grind out the words from a parched throat.
They wanted to kill me. That Irishman, [Francis] Hackett, former edi-
tor of the New Republic I think was the only one who defended me at least
vocally. It was a stand off otherwise, half the guys went away scowling, the
other grinning. I felt better as soon as I had finished the reading. (1957b,
311)
For Williams, this address was a salvo aimed directly at the cultural
establishment. He understood, even before he made the address, that
his words would not be welcome here. Nevertheless, he forewent his
cocktail and meal and delivered his defense of these artists. The re-
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2: ‘‘THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN ART’’ 53
sult—at least in Williams’s eyes—was neither victory nor defeat. Yet

this ‘‘stand-off’’ left him alive to continue to fight another day. It also
left him more knowledgeable about those that opposed his view of
American art. In a January 6, 1952, letter to Louis Zukofsky, he wrote
the following about the experience: ‘‘It has made me a wiser and a sad-
der man. But I have been able to round out my own concepts as
against them. If I survive I may have learned something at the end of
another year’’ (2003, 449).
In his remarks to the Institute, Williams’s appreciation for the Ab-
stract Expressionists is clear. He saw the painters responding to the
same challenges he struggled with as an American poet. Specifically
they pushed against conventional constructs to discover new forms of
artistic expression. In his earlier essay, ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Ac-
tion’’ (1958), he describes the need to find ‘‘a new measure or a new
way of measuring that will be commensurate with the social, economic
world in which we are living as contrasted with the past’’ (1969, 283).
He saw young Robert Motherwell, whom he specifically mentions in
the address, as the personification of a group of painters who honor
this ‘‘new vision’’ in their particular medium (1978, 215).
A Close Look at Williams’s Defense
To fully grasp Williams’s perception and understanding of Abstract

Expressionism, we must examine his address closely. Through this ap-
proach, we see Williams utilizing some very Emersonian notions
about American artistry, in order to defend these young artists. In his
introduction to The Recognizable Image, a collection of essays including
this address, Bram Dijkstra offers an intriguing overview of what Wil-
liams said that night to the Institute. In Dijkstra’s words, Williams
‘‘went on to elevate the American artist to the position of the world’s
savior, since the ‘drift of time’ had selected America to be the locus for
the next step in the transcendence of obsolete modes of expression.
The article is a rousing utopian statement of all the wonderful things
which will happen to us if only we make certain to continue the pursuit
of new form in art. That this ‘new form’ closely corresponded to the
processes of object delineation advocated by Williams in both art and
literature goes without saying’’ (1978, 29). Obliquely Dijkstra’s lan-
guage suggests Emerson’s presence shadowing Williams’s essay. The
depiction that Djkstra mentions of the artist as ‘‘savior,’’ for instance,
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echoes a similar idea in Emerson’s essay ‘‘The Poet’’ that ‘‘poets are
thus liberating gods’’ (2001, 194).
In an effort to cultivate his audience’s appreciation for abstraction
in the visual arts, Williams begins his address by identifying with
them. His use of ‘‘We’’ rather than ‘‘You’’ evinces this role: ‘‘Have
we the courage, the honesty, and the patience to grasp our
opportunities? . . . The best of modern benefits are rooted in us; when
we walk in the medieval past we walk (, in all the world,) away from
America’’ (1978, 210). Williams’s use of the pronoun is not simply a
technique to manipulate his audience’s attitude toward abstraction in
the arts. He sincerely struggled to come to terms with the significance
of this movement. ‘‘We are puzzled and bewildered,’’ he states, ‘‘by
the apparently inexplicable emergence in our day of the abstractionists
in the pictorial arts.’’ Therefore, in an effort to convey his understand-
ing and appreciation for pictorial abstraction, he places it within the
broader trends occurring in modern poetry. Together they are, as he
describes, the ‘‘children . . . of that time-drift which has brought our
culture pattern, what we call America, to the fore’’ (1978, 211). It is in
this way that Williams identifies these artistic trends with the authen-
ticity of being American.
In accordance with this notion of American authenticity, it is not
surprising that Williams invokes the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emerson’s call for an authentically American art dates back to the
1830s. As Paul Mariani points out, Emersonian thought pervaded
Williams’s early Unitarian upbringing, particularly in terms of a
‘‘well-developed, self-reliant intellectual perspective toward matters
spiritual’’ (1981, 12). However, I do not want to argue here about Wil-
liams’s spiritual alignment with Emerson, but rather I want to com-
pare several of their ideas about poetry. It should be noted that
Williams rarely references Emerson directly. When he does mention
Emerson, as in ‘‘The American Background,’’ he offers the famed es-
sayist qualified praise, describing his verse as ‘‘too often circumscribed
by a slightly hackneyed gentility’’ (1969, 155). In short, for Williams,
while Emerson promulgates important ideas and ideals for American
poets, he seems too connected in his poetry to the traditions he seeks
to escape. According to Mariani, ‘‘It would therefore remain for Wil-
liams to fulfill the promise of Emerson in his own essays on American
art’’ (1981, 351–52).
In his address to the National Institute for Arts and Letters, Wil-
liams directly references Emerson only once. Yet it is a reference that
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informs the scope of his address. He states, ‘‘Art raises the dignity of
man. It allows him to say, I am, in concrete terms. It defines his envi-
ronment. As Emerson put it (to our shame we have never adequately
heeded his words): ‘A national literature consummates and crowns the
greatness of a people. The best actions, indeed, and the greatest vir-
tues, are scarcely possible, till the inspiring force of literature is felt.’
For only by a multiplication of the gestures of art does any man show
himself to be fully alive upon the earth (, does any culture pattern
grow to be distinquished)’’ (1978, 212).
These words encapsulate Emerson’s ideas expressed in his August
31, 1837, address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massa-
chusetts, later entitled ‘‘The American Scholar.’’ Yet, surprisingly, the
words are not Emerson’s.1 They are, in fact, from Horace Bushnell’s
1837 oration entitled ‘‘The True Wealth or Weal of Nations,’’ which
he delivered to the Alpha of Connecticut at Yale College a few weeks
before Emerson’s address. In that speech, Bushnell follows up the por-
tion that Williams quoted with the following assertion, ‘‘There cannot
even be a high tone of general education without a literature’’ (1915,
19). Despite the error, Williams’s reference is valuable. He associates
a value of authentic identity—the ‘‘I am’’—with the formation of a
national art. It is this authenticity of artistry that fosters the ‘‘best ac-
tions’’ and ‘‘greatest virtues’’ necessary in a great culture.
It remains unclear why Williams attributed Bushnell’s words to
Emerson. Both addresses follow one another in a collection entitled
Representative Phi Beta Kappa Orations, so it is plausible that while writ-
ing down the quote Williams conflated Bushnell’s speech with the
more famous Emerson address. Nevertheless, although the words are
not Emerson’s, the spirit of what he says is very much in line with
Emerson’s desire to cultivate an authentic cultural expression as evi-
dent in an essay like ‘‘The Poet.’’ Bram Dijkstra points out that the
American Transcendentalists influenced Alfred Stieglitz’s desire to
formulate a ‘‘consciously American art movement’’ and that Williams
‘‘eagerly listened’’ to the photographer in his formative years (1969,
104). This influence finds expression in Williams’s work of the 1920s.
For instance, Ian Copestake persuasively argues that in Spring and All
Emerson is ‘‘buried in its prose by the very forces of history and cul-
tural authority of which Williams wants to make the reader aware’’
(2004, 7). He goes on to assert the following: ‘‘Emerson makes no ap-
pearance, but the weight of his insistence on the cultural indepen-
dence of the United States from Europe stands behind every line of
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the project Williams puts forth’’ (8). This same notion of cultural in-
dependence is true over thirty years later in ‘‘The American Spirit in
Art.’’ In the case of this later address, however, Emerson does make a
significant appearance, although inexplicably cloaked in the words of
another famous nineteenth-century figure. Despite Williams’s error,
it is clear he invokes Emerson to ground his defense of the Abstract
Expressionists in explicitly American terms.
After these misquoted lines, Williams touts the importance of the
artist to his audience. He tells them, ‘‘The artist is the most important
individual known to the world. He is not an accessory, not a decora-
tion, not a plaything. His work is supremely necessary’’ (1978, 213).
Such an assertion of the artist’s value is reminiscent of Emerson’s
‘‘The Poet.’’ For Emerson, the poet’s importance is based upon his
role in society. Early on in that famous essay, he declares, ‘‘The signs
and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man
foretold. He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the
only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance
which he describes. He is a beholder of ideas, and an utterer of the
necessary and causal’’ (2001, 185). Williams, the literal doctor / poet,
understood the vital role of the artist in society, particularly in regard
to the notion of news. After all, as he famously states in ‘‘Asphodel,
that Greeny Flower,’’
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
(1988, 318)
Williams understood that much art in his day lacked such ‘‘relevance’’
and the consequences for society are deadening. When art—whether
in word or image—is created from authentic and imaginative origins,
it becomes ‘‘necessary and causal’’ for the sustenance and growth of a
people.
As Williams continues his defense of this contemporary art move-
ment, he touts the importance of artists staying grounded in the pres-
ent day. Such an artist has amazing power. He asserts, ‘‘the artist
drives us to believe that we are alive . . . now, here—as others have
lived in days past—or as others, we hope, have lived in the past, of
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whom we are jealous that they may have known and experienced more
than we’’ (1978, 213). Williams’s words are strikingly Emersonian. In
the introduction to Nature, Emerson asserts that artists cannot be sat-
isfied to build ‘‘the sepulchers of the fathers’’ (2001, 35). Rather, he
calls on his generation to recognize that ‘‘the sun shines to-day
also. . . . There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.’’ For Williams,
the artist is different than the priest and philosopher. The artist plays
the crucial role of grounding us in our living moment. Like Emerson
before him, Williams insists upon originality for the artist, particularly
as he or she attempts to represent the particular time and place. In
many ways, for Williams, the cultivation of such originality gives evi-
dence of an ‘‘ourstanding [sic] culture’’ (1978, 213). He references
‘‘Athens, Rome, Paris, London—perhaps Tecochtitlan’’ as he frames
the question ‘‘Who will be next?’’ His essential point, however, re-
mains the differences and uniqueness of these periods, as evident in
the Greek hexameter, Dante’s terza rima, Shakespeare’s English line,
and ‘‘Walt Whitman’s amorphous line of yesterday.’’ In short, pro-
gression in the arts is natural and must be cultivated.
Not surprisingly, Williams also places this avant-garde trend of
newness amid the larger Emersonian goal of American artistry.
Toward the opening of ‘‘Circles,’’ Emerson claims that ‘‘[t]he new
continents are built out of the ruins of an old planet . . . New arts
destroy the old’’ (2001, 175). Like Emerson, Williams believed the
cultivation of an authentic national art important. Paul Mariani re-
minds us, ‘‘Emerson had called for a national literature as long ago
as 1837 in his address to the Harvard divinity students, and here was
Williams at the end of 1951 again insisting that the National Institute
heed what was truly distinctive in the American art experiment’’ (1981,
643). For Emerson, what was associated with this goal of American
artistry was a new way of seeing the world. This emphasis upon seeing
is evident from the very first lines of Nature when Emerson chides his
American contemporaries: ‘‘Our age is retrospective’’ and ‘‘The fore-
going generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through
their eyes’’ (2001, 35). For Emerson, such backward looking reliance
on other people’s eyes cripples an individual. By the close of Nature,
in ‘‘Prospects,’’ Emerson talks about the change that needs to be
worked in the individual so that ‘‘he shall enter without more wonder
than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight’’
(55).
In ‘‘The Poet,’’ Emerson laments the fact that no poet yet truly sees
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America and its newness. ‘‘We have yet had no genius in America,’’ he
charges, ‘‘with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incompara-
ble materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times,
another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires
in Homer’’ (2001, 196). Williams also attaches a cultural importance
to the concept of perception. In his address, he identifies two things
that faced the first settlers: ‘‘a physical world of tremendous re-
sources’’ and ‘‘a new vision . . . which has baffled them to the present
day’’ (1978, 215). For Williams, this new vision has proved to be the
thing more difficult to master. It is also essential for authentic Ameri-
can art—it is what he describes as ‘‘the backbone of our literature and
so of all our art.’’
For Williams, it seems clear. To revert back to tradition, ‘‘the more
medieval patterns of privilege,’’ American art perishes. He under-
stands that this desire to return to a European past emerges in many
ways from the anxieties and uncertainties of facing the American ‘‘wil-
derness’’ (217). He offers his audience an example: Henry James. Wil-
liams counts James as a ‘‘great artist.’’ Yet in his refuge in the
‘‘intellectual comforts of Victorian England,’’ he left, according to
Williams, ‘‘another world behind’’ (216). Williams asserts that artists
like James who have ‘‘turned their backs on us’’ should not be either
admired or criticized. Rather, he argues that they have foregone what
he sees as ‘‘the tremendous opportunity of our letters to follow a pion-
eering mind into the implications of our new cultural opportunity . . .
that is the fault’’ (216). Regardless of this ‘‘fault,’’ these artists are
praised by the establishment for clinging to what Williams describes
as ‘‘the old modes’’ (217). Consequently those who diverge or break
from these established modes are ‘‘badly at a loss.’’
It is only in moving forward, according to Williams, ‘‘to patterns
bred of a cultural initiative hitherto untried’’ that Americans can cre-
ate an authentic artistic expression (1978, 215). In this way, Williams
sets up the dilemma facing artists: ‘‘either to seek what security and
comfort there is for him in past configurations of learning, or to follow
his great constructive genius into his own world, to raise that to such
distinction that it will shine in the galaxies of historical cultures of the
world as something incomparably great’’ (217). In such an either/or
proposition, Williams clearly identifies cultural authenticity and artis-
tic greatness with the latter. After famously declaring in ‘‘The Poet’’
that it is a ‘‘metre-making argument’’ and ‘‘not metres’’ ‘‘that makes a
poem,’’ Emerson describes this argument as ‘‘a thought so passionate
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and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architec-
ture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. . . . in order of
genesis the thought is prior to the form’’ (2001, 186). For Williams, it
becomes incumbent upon the artist to respond to his unique ‘‘con-
structive genius.’’ That constructive attribute enables him to be truly
imaginative and therefore ‘‘incomparably great’’ (1978, 217).
In short, Williams seeks from his audience at the very least tolera-
tion for the new. He quotes extensively from the article ‘‘Not the Age
of Atoms but of Welfare for All’’ by the famed British historian Arnold
Toynbee, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine October
21, 1951. Williams taps into Toynbee’s recently stated belief that the
twentieth century will be remembered for the desire ‘‘to make the
benefits of civilization available for the whole human race’’ (1978,
214). Williams argues that this sociohistorical assessment corresponds
as well to modern art—it is, as he argues, ‘‘permission, for all’’ (1978,
218). By accepting such a premise, it enables one to better appreciate
modern art. ‘‘From that through cubism, Matisse, to Motherwell, the
ultimate step is one gesture. And it is important because it says that
you don’t paint a picture or write a poem about anything, you make a
picture or a poem of anything. You see how that comes from Toyn-
bee’s discovery. Abundance for all’’ (218). Such a democratic notion
of acceptance towards art seems ideally American. Importantly Wil-
liams’s link of Matisse with an abstractionist like Robert Motherwell
legitimizes the generation of younger painters under scrutiny. Not
only does the link offer validation, it shifts the artistic representative
from France to America and suggests the fulfillment of America’s ar-
tistic promise.
Williams’s reference to Motherwell also demonstrates that the
older poet was not blind to the younger man’s contribution to the vi-
sual arts. As previously mentioned, he respected Motherwell’s work as
a continuation of earlier modernist goals. He saw Motherwell and the
others responding to the same artistic issues that he struggled with
throughout his career, continually pushing against fixed boundaries in
the quest for imaginative authenticity. He also saw this linked to a
larger goal of American artists that stretches back to Emerson.
For Williams, these artists should not be criticized by National In-
stitute members, but rather applauded. Instead of ‘‘turning their backs
on us’’ (1978, 219), Williams believes these artists have seized ‘‘the
new opportunity.’’ With any new effort, there is naturally uncertainty.
For Williams, though, there is some degree of excitement with such
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uncertainty. Discoveries await the artist who pushes ahead: ‘‘what sa-
vannas, what elemental forests, what seas of the white whale we shall
next be called upon to penetrate.’’ Williams’s reference to Melville in-
vokes the greatness of another misunderstood American experi-
menter. Upon the release of Moby Dick, Melville was seen as cracked—
it was not until much later that his genius became recognizable. Only
a few years after Williams’s address, Pollock would paint The Deep
(1953), alluding to a passage in Melville’s masterpiece (Frank 1983,
97). Therefore, by situating the abstractionists in such a tradition,
Williams calls upon his fellow members to accept them. He remarks,
‘‘Of such a one as Motherwell, the abstractionist, who says that the
whole occupation of painting is a matter of the relationship between
pigment and the surface to which it is applied, to such a man we can-
not but offer a hearty welcome. We should be glad that someone has
turned up among us to work out that (thankless) historical process. It
does not exclude other processes though it does constitute a criticism
of them and will prove, in the end, an enlargement upon them to the
benefit of the total process of painting’’ (1978, 219). In these remarks,
Williams’s appreciation for Motherwell and the Abstract Expression-
ists is clear. He saw Motherwell and others honoring this ‘‘new vision’’
in their particular medium (215).
Williams’s Contact with Motherwell
Williams’s references to Motherwell are intriguing to consider, es-

pecially given the few critical explorations involving Williams and
Motherwell. In ‘‘The Blue Nude and Mrs. Pappadopoulos,’’ Terrence
Diggory discusses Williams’s ‘‘excitement’’ for Pollock’s abstraction
and ‘‘design’’; he ultimately links Motherwell to this ‘‘tradition’’
(1992, 31). Paul Mariani notes Williams’s admiration for both Pollock
and Motherwell (1981, 670). In William Carlos Williams: The American
Background, Mike Weaver notes Motherwell’s interest in Williams and
their mutual ‘‘need for the sensual in art’’ (1971, 140). He also points
out Williams’s discomfort with the surrealism he perceived Mother-
well championing.
Motherwell appears to be the only younger generation New York
School painter with whom Williams had personal contact. He was an
avid reader and attracted to such writers as Joyce, Melville, Stevens,
and Hopkins. After receiving his A.B. from Stanford University and
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studying philosophy at Harvard, he came to New York in 1940 to

study with Meyer Schapiro in the Art History Department at Colum-
bia University (Caws 1996, xix). He soon became acquainted with sev-
eral surrealists, most notably and influentially Roberto Matta. His
friendship with Matta resulted in a desire, as he told Paul Cummings
in a 1971 interview for the American Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution, ‘‘to start a revolution, a movement within
Surrealism.’’ Motherwell claims that at this time he ‘‘went around ex-
plaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way
that you could have a movement was that it had some common princi-
ple.’’ From Motherwell’s perspective, this surrealist technique ‘‘had all
kinds of possibilities that had really never been developed.’’2
It was at this time, toward the close of 1941, that Motherwell con-
tacted Williams about the surrealist journal venture VVV. In his intro-
ductory letter, Motherwell admits that it was his idea to get Williams
involved (1992, 16). In part, this explains why Motherwell was the one
writing, but, according to the younger painter, Williams’s nationality
also mattered. Of the other men involved in the magazine (Nicholas
Calas and André Breton), Motherwell was the only American. There-
fore, with Williams’s inclusion on the editorial board, the two men
would represent the United States and Breton and Calas would repre-
sent Europe. Motherwell set forth an extremely flexible arrangement
for Williams: ‘‘Your collaboration can be extremely active, if you have
the time, or, if not, limited to giving me occasional advice. The use of
your name in any case is of such obvious aid to us that it needs no
comment’’ (17). Clearly the terms for Williams’s involvement re-
volved around the clout affiliated with his ‘‘name.’’ That avant-garde
reputation made Williams a desirable collaborator and an approach-
able person to younger artists.
Besides providing the scope of Williams’s possible participation,
Motherwell also offers Williams an informative personal introduction.
He explains how he came into ‘‘contact’’ with the surrealists who of-
fered him what he describes as ‘‘a solution to those problems of how
to free the imagination in concrete terms, which are so baffling to an
American’’ (17). He thus transformed from the passivity of ‘‘an ob-
server, like a character in James’’ to taking a ‘‘partisan stand, in the
creative sense’’ (17). Coincidently the problem that Motherwell con-
fronts is one that Williams faced with his own poetry. (After all, isn’t
it what Spring and All is about?) His comment also parallels Williams’s
thoughts in ‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’ about the ‘‘new vision’’ that
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has ‘‘baffled’’ settlers since their arrival in North America. Motherwell

later laments the limited quantity of ‘‘imaginative writing’’ in
America—‘‘you and Stevens are the only ones I know whom I can
read.’’ This quality is in fact why Motherwell has even contacted Wil-
liams to serve as editor, even willing, as he wrote, ‘‘to spend a whole
day waiting about, and talking between calls’’ (18).
Another important feature of Motherwell’s letter is an introduction
to his ideas about Surrealism. He offered Williams four propositions:
‘‘stimulation of the imagination’’; ‘‘the preservation of the dignity and
value of personal feelings’’; ‘‘revolutionism’’; ‘‘the dialectic’’ (17–18).
The ideas about the ‘‘stimulation of the imagination’’ and ‘‘revolu-
tionism’’ particularly align themselves with Williams’s goals as an art-
ist. In his seminal study, William Carlos Williams: The American
Background, Mike Weaver points out that Williams also shared Moth-
erwell’s emphasis on personal feeling based in part on an ‘‘acceptance
of the aggression and violence in the American character, as well as
repudiation of the power of the natural and social sciences in society’’
(140).
Weaver is so pertinent here because he persuasively argues that
Williams’s problem with Surrealism was its French origins, dating
back to the First World War. ‘‘In Williams’ unusual view,’’ he writes,
‘‘an art of correct naming of internal events had been supplanted by a
professional vanguardism which, transplanted in America, managed to
exploit the weakness of a society not unlike the first one it had aban-
doned’’ (140). Earlier in The Embodiment of Knowledge Williams had
written that American art would emerge independent of French art-
istry. ‘‘What shall be seen then in America? Nothing French surely’’
(1974, 24). Now, he feared that Surrealism, particularly as identified
with Breton, could stifle this true invention. As expressed in his earlier
rumination in The Embodiment of Knowledge, French imitation could
have disastrous effects: ‘‘to ape French manner is to put out his eye’’
(25). Such imitation ultimately would destroy any potential for the
emergence of self-reliant American artists. Therefore, as Weaver ex-
plains, ‘‘by 1946 the closed fraternity of the French group in New
York represented to Williams a new confinement of the mind instead
of its hoped-for release’’ (1971, 141). Given this context it seems that
Williams perceived in the abstractionists that he described in ‘‘The
American Spirit in Art’’ the possibility for a hoped for release.
Williams did reply to Motherwell. According to Motherwell’s De-
cember 8, 1941, letter, he ‘‘liked’’ what the young painter had to say.
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Motherwell told Williams he was ‘‘even more pleased at my suspicion

that we speek [sic] the same language’’ (Williams Papers). Eventually
the two men met. And although Williams did not serve as an editor
of the magazine, he did publish the poem ‘‘Catastrophic Birth’’ in its
inaugural issue (Motherwell 1992, 19). One stanza, in particular,
speaks to the idea of newness that Williams would later use in his ad-
dress to the National Institute.
Each age brings new calls upon violence

for new rewards, variants of the old.
Unless each hold firm
Unless each remain inflexible
there can be no new. The new opens
new ways beyond all known ways.
(1988, 56)
The poem chronicles the volcanic eruption of Mt. Pelée in 1902, an

event that Williams claims ‘‘wiped out the last of my mother’s family,
the Hurrards’’ (1951a, 71). Despite the devastation caused by the ex-
plosion, the poem ends with a belief in cyclical regeneration:
Rain will fall. The wind and the birds

will bring seeds, the river changes
its channel and fish re-enter it.
(1988, 57)
Williams’s poem relates the necessity of violence to bring change—

‘‘violence alone opens the shell of the nut’’ (55). In his address to the
National Institute, he asserts that the old ‘‘line must be broken down
before it is built up anew, on a broader basis, according to another
measure’’ (1978, 219). Interestingly, by the time that the short-lived
magazine was first published in 1942, Motherwell also was not an edi-
tor of VVV. According to that 1971 interview conducted by Paul
Cummings, Motherwell resigned because of an expectation that he
would provide or raise the funds necessary for the magazine’s publica-
tion. Despite his resignation, he did, along with Harold Rosenberg,
contribute to the first issue.
Williams’s defense of Motherwell and the abstractionists in his ad-
dress to the National Institute, however, seems somewhat short lived.
Right after his remark about Motherwell, he surprisingly offers ‘‘one
further step’’ in the progression of ‘‘abstract painting’’ and that is
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‘‘when it is being done by the blind’’ (1978, 219). The remark is quite
curious in the overall context of this address. Does he mean it to be
funny? If so, it comes at a strange moment in the speech. It undercuts
the very movement he has been defending—perhaps, he is merely
throwing the proverbial meat to his conservative audience. More than
likely, though, it offers a candid expression of his uncertainty about
the direction and outcome of this art movement. In his discussion of
Williams’s response to Surrealism, Henry Sayre points out an inter-
esting pattern in Williams: ‘‘if Williams was sympathetic to the surre-
alist venture, he was antagonistic as well. Both his enthusiasm for and
his reservations about the movement could in fact be extended to most
other modern art, including his own’’ (1983, 24). For Williams, as
Sayre suggests, such a tension seems rooted in an aesthetic ‘‘based on
an unresolvable dialectical opposition: on the one hand was the mind,
the imagination, and its potential to create order and form; on the
other was the world, fragmented and chaotic’’ (5). Sayre’s study identi-
fies Williams’s competing pulls toward abstraction and reality that
Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism never seem to satisfy in him
(26).
Williams’s reference to Motherwell as the representative painter of
this movement is worthwhile to consider. By singling him out, Wil-
liams, in some way, concretizes this trend of abstraction. At this point
in his painting career, Motherwell had created such key paintings as
The Little Spanish Prison (1941–44), Pancho Villa Dead and Alive (1943),
At Five in the Afternoon (1949). Williams most likely referenced Moth-
erwell because of their personal connection. However, at this time
Motherwell did write extensively about art. In fact, he emerged as one
of the leading spokesmen of Abstract Expressionism. His writings
from 1950–51 even offer some intriguing parallels to Williams’s ad-
dress. For instance, in 1950, he wrote a preface to Georges Duthuit’s
The Fauvist Painters. He praises Henri Matisse, the painter Williams
links to Motherwell’s emergence, and highlights how Matisse’s use of
color in relation to objects actually initiated the ‘‘move toward ab-
straction’’ (1992, 75). Motherwell’s address ‘‘The New York School,’’
delivered October 27, 1950, goes on to situate the rise of abstraction.
His address, like Williams’s later one, responds to criticisms of Ab-
stract Expressionism and offers a defense. Like Williams, he expresses
uncertainty over its ‘‘value’’; however, he touts its ‘‘authenticity’’ (77).
He denigrates artistic conventionality and promotes the New York
School artists as more interested in ‘‘discovery’’ than imposition (78).
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Several other Motherwell addresses and commentary predate Wil-

liams’s address. On February 5, 1951, for instance, he participated in a
symposium at the Museum of Modern Art. In his contribution entitled
‘‘What Abstract Art Means to Me,’’ Motherwell asserted that ‘‘each
period and place has its own art and its aesthetic—which are specific
applications of a more general set of human values, with emphases and
rejections corresponding to the basic needs and desires of a particular
place and time’’ (1992, 85). Also in 1951, he wrote the preface to Sev-
enteen Modern American Painters, delivered ‘‘The Rise and Continuity
of Abstract Art,’’ a lecture he presented at Harvard in April, and he
wrote a preface to The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, as well as
a statement and introduction to Modern Artists in America: First Series.
Whether or not Williams read these pieces, clearly Motherwell
emerged at this time as an articulate spokesperson for the artistic
movement. Consequently, given the personal contact and public rec-
ognition, Williams’s use of Motherwell’s name in his address makes
sense.
O’Hara and Motherwell
Like Williams, O’Hara also admired the work of Motherwell. He

describes the painter ‘‘as one of the leading figures in the greatest rev-
olution in modern art since Cubism, Abstract Expressionism’’ (1975,
65). Motherwell, according to Perloff, was one of O’Hara’s ‘‘gods’’
(1998, 85). He became personally acquainted with Motherwell
through the painter Helen Frankenthaler, Motherwell’s wife and one
of O’Hara’s close friends. In 1965, Motherwell handpicked O’Hara as
curator for a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of
Modern Art (Motherwell 1992, 148). He desired the exhibition to be
‘‘more like a poetry recital than a retrospective.’’ In consideration of his
public praise, O’Hara was the perfect man for the exhibition. His essay
‘‘The Grand Manner of Motherwell,’’ first printed in Vogue in 1965,
describes Motherwell as ‘‘tough, sassy, and, yes, elegant, as a painter’’
(1983, 175). He claims their talks were ‘‘almost always about poetry’’
(176), including the work of Williams, Stevens, and his French favor-
ites. These conversations no doubt informed O’Hara’s view of Moth-
erwell’s artistry. ‘‘Without being literary in content,’’ O’Hara writes,
‘‘his work continually reflects the importance of poetry in his life and
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art’’ (177). Earlier in a 1963 issue of Kulchur, he even described Moth-

erwell’s work at the Janis as ‘‘a great lyric gift’’ (151).
O’Hara’s affiliation with Motherwell upset some of O’Hara’s set.
According to Brad Gooch, ‘‘his disgruntled Downtown friends’’
viewed this as a ‘‘shift Uptown’’ (1993, 446). O’Hara’s friend Larry
Rivers even asserted that O’Hara did not care for Motherwell’s work
at all—‘‘He admitted to me that he didn’t like Motherwell’s work at
all. And he thought that he was an idiot on top of it’’ (447). It is diffi-
cult to reconcile O’Hara’s work on the exhibit and praise of Mother-
well with such a comment. It may have more to do with Rivers’ own
feelings about Motherwell than with O’Hara’s.
When faced with composing a statement for the Motherwell retro-
spective catalog, O’Hara struggled with ‘‘writer’s block’’ (Motherwell
1992, 148). He asked Motherwell for some ideas and then went on to
use the painter’s letter in the exhibition catalog. Although this action
initially upset Motherwell, he later admitted that he respected its in-
clusion (155). Motherwell’s letter offers an arbitrary series of ideas re-
lated to art, poetry, and modernity. For instance, he mentions that he
often turned to ‘‘the poets for suggestions and arguments’’ when Ab-
stract Expressionism was criticized (154). He contends that ‘‘painting
is also a language’’ (148) and expresses the problematic nature of ‘‘in-
venting a new language’’ to express feeling more accurately (149). No
doubt Williams, if alive at the time, would understand Motherwell’s
dilemma, regardless of the different mediums. The letter, despite
Motherwell’s initial reservations, offers an imaginative display of the
painter’s thoughts and feelings sure to complement the artistry exhib-
ited.
Another Contact with the ‘‘New’’ American Art
At this point, it may help to discuss Williams’s friendship with Har-

old Rosenberg, another influential figure associated with Abstract Ex-
pressionism. Rosenberg gained notoriety as an art critic and coined
the phrase ‘‘Action Painters.’’ In his landmark essay ‘‘The American
Action Painters’’ (1952), he describes the artistic process this way: ‘‘At
a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter
after another as an arena in which to act rather than as a space in which
to reproduce, re-design, analyze or ‘express’ an object, actual or imag-
ined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
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(1965, 25). This active involvement with the canvas echoes Williams.
Bill Berkson, for one, has noted this relation: ‘‘Rosenberg had, after
all, only recently come to art criticism from a short career as a poet,
and, whether he knew it or not, his vision of the painter’s canvas as ‘an
arena in which to act’ had at least one antecedent in William Carlos
Williams’ lecture of 1948, ‘The Poem as a Field of Action’ ’’ (1994,
146). Berkson’s assumption about Williams’s influence on Rosenberg
seems highly likely. In two essays from his landmark collection The
Tradition of the New, Rosenberg references Williams’s verse. In the
essay ‘‘French Silence and American Poetry,’’ he lists Williams, in fact,
as one of the ‘‘poets who spoke American best’’ (1965, 91).
More telling is the fact that Rosenberg corresponded with Williams
in the early 1940s. In one of the letters dated January 25, 1941, Rosen-
berg discusses the need for ‘‘Great Literature’’ for the ‘‘Times’’ and
references, in part, what Williams and others have done in verse. The
letter closes with Rosenberg’s praise for Williams’s Edgar Allan Poe
essay included In the American Grain: ‘‘That article, which goes
counter to every/a ccepted [sic] notion about American Literary Tradi-
tion, seems to me one of the chief critical embryos of modern U.S.’’
(Williams Papers).3 The second Rosenberg letter dated April 6, 1942,
pleads with Williams to write a ‘‘blurb’’ for his book of poems, Trance
Above the Streets. He confesses, ‘‘My poems owe a lot to your work, as
anyone can see’’ (Williams Papers). In the letter, Rosenberg also can-
didly admits his desire to use Williams’s positive response: ‘‘I have
been depending on that, even though I know that you are busy, and
might not be sufficiently ‘seized’ by the collection to have something
come out of itself.’’
Williams did write a ‘‘blurb’’; however, for obvious reasons, Rosen-
berg never included it in his book. The essay theorized more about
poetry than offering a compelling hook for Rosenberg’s poems. Wil-
liams devoted the opening pages to a theoretical discussion of the line.
When he did get around to discussing Rosenberg, it was less than
flattering: ‘‘This book is made up mostly of early work. I find it a little
tiresome, it seems to me a little too much a language study (a bad thing
to say here). Many of these poems do not come off, they are not excit-
ing enough, not differentiated enough one from the other, they seem
all drawn after one model. This is, of course, an exaggeration but it is
the feeling I get from the book. Here’s a man I respect. I am not satis-
fied with him, probably because he exhibits too many of the incomple-
tions I see in myself. Perhaps he will be the one to come out of the
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present stage of his writing to a fuller realization of his cues’’ (1985,

128). Clearly, from the perspective of an aspiring poet like Rosenberg,
Williams’s preface missed the mark. Williams’s bluntness, however,
conveys two discerning points. First, Rosenberg was not an original or
profound poet. Second, Rosenberg had potential to move beyond this
‘‘tiresome’’ phase of his writing, perhaps predictive of the acclaim he
later would receive for his art writing.
The apparent influence of Williams upon Rosenberg, however
small, cannot be dismissed, particularly because Rosenberg promoted
Abstract Expressionism and coined ‘‘Action Painting.’’ His emphasis
upon action also taps into an influential cultural ideal rooted in Emer-
sonian thought. In ‘‘The American Scholar,’’ a famed speech delivered
in 1837 to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard University, Emerson
calls upon his audience of young Harvard graduates to be active, not
static thinkers and to emulate ‘‘Man Thinking.’’ Emerson proposes
three influences to foster such an ideal: Nature, Books, and Action.
Although Emerson claims that action is subordinate for the scholar,
he sees it as an essential component in his ideal. ‘‘Without it,’’ he
writes, ‘‘he is not yet a man. . . . The preamble of thought, the transi-
tion through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is
action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know
whose words are loaded with life, and whose not’’ (2001, 61). It is this
notion of action, embedded in the very essence of what it means to be
an American ‘‘Man Thinking,’’ that permeates the poetry of Williams
and O’Hara and infuses the work of artists like Jackson Pollock and
David Smith. One can not help to read or see their particular works
and see the ‘‘living’’ inherent in the art.
That notion of ‘‘action’’ almost functions as a requisite cultural ex-
pectation. Instead of action geared toward a Franklin productivity and
material self-improvement, Emerson frames action as necessary to in-
tellectual, artist, and spiritual self-improvement. Later in his address
he states, ‘‘I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his
nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is
pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation,
want, are instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power. It is the
raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid products. A
strange process too, this by which experience is converted into
thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture
goes forward at all hours’’ (2001, 61). In these lines, Emerson trans-
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forms the meaning of action for the American artist/intellectual from

the notion of earning material well-being to something more valuable,
at least from an Emersonian perspective, that of creating something
new in either thought or artistry. In fact, Matthew Baigell asserts, ‘‘In
the drip paintings, Pollock becomes Emerson’s Genuine Man, one
who ‘acts his thoughts’ ’’ (2001, 145).
It is not particularly new to associate Emerson with the Abstract
Expressionists. In his study Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century
America, Baigell offers a compelling exploration of several artists—
Pollock, Clifford Still, and Barnett Newman—who demonstrate a
shared sensibility with Emerson. For Baigell, Emerson is an important
presence in understanding this movement: ‘‘It is a presence rather
than a source or an influence. And it is not limited to Emerson, since
it can be found in such figures as Walt Whitman and William James,
among others. But it is easier to say ‘an Emersonian presence’ because
precise influences are difficult probably impossible to establish’’ (2001,
142). He goes on to trace this Emersonian presence back to the influ-
ence of Thomas Hart Benton who was an important influence on Pol-
lock—one that the young painter needed to react against to forge his
own authenticity and artistic independence. For Baigell, this is a ‘‘su-
preme Emersonian statement’’ (143).
In his discussion, Baigell also references Rosenberg’s description of
action painting. Instead of associating it with Williams, like Bill Berk-
son does, Baigell traces it to Emerson. As he argues, ‘‘Rosenberg pos-
its the ideal Emersonian situation of a presumably knowledgeable
artist in the act of self-definition who is aware of, but at the same time
forgets, the inhibitions of past training and experience for a more di-
rect and more honest and more authentic response to the stimulus at
hand’’ (150). Baigell does not stop there—he also traces Rosenberg’s
idea to a possible antecedent in Marsden Hartley’s writing. Specifi-
cally he cites Hartley’s 1914 exhibition statement: ‘‘A picture is but a
given space where things of the moment which happen to the painter
occur. The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in
it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion. It is essential that
they occur to him directly from his experience’’ (151). For Baigell,
Hartley’s proposition, like Rosenberg, reflects Emersonian thought.
Now, to bring this Emersonian association full circle, it’s helpful to
recall that Williams and Hartley were close friends. Both were outsid-
ers, William Marling contends, who believed in ‘‘the potential for a
native modern art in America’’ (1982, 70). To this end, Williams men-
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tions Hartley’s Adventures in the Arts (1921) several times in Spring and
All. Toward its conclusion, Williams references ‘‘The Importance of
Being Dada,’’ Hartley’s afterword, which advocates reducing the capi-
tal front letter of ‘‘Art’’ to ‘‘art’’ to create ‘‘a release for the expression
of natural sensibilities’’ (1921, 252). Echoing this call, Williams writes
that the imagination’s effect is ‘‘to free the world of fact from the im-
positions of ‘art’ (see Hartley’s last chapter) and to liberate the man to
act in whatever direction his disposition leads’’ (1986, 235). His asser-
tion offers yet another compelling antecedent to Rosenberg’s defini-
tion about action painting. All of these antecedents, whether from
Emerson, Hartley, or Williams, reflect a cultural build-up to Rosen-
berg’s definition and ultimately the American artists who exemplified
it.
A Final Summation of the ‘‘American Spirit’’
Unsurprisingly, given the Cold War backdrop of his address to the

National Institute, Williams concludes ‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’
by contrasting American artistry with Russia. He touts the progressive
nature of American artists who ‘‘may lead his world to a healing
knowledge of its present state’’ (1978, 220). In contrast, ‘‘You see what
a mess the Russians make of it when they try (through Marx) to imitate
us. Instead of freedom they found themselves on the denial of free-
dom; instead of giving their writers a free reign to develop what they,
as a nation, are in need of, they castrate them, leaving us conceptually
(if not in practice) supreme. (The lag of the middle ages is too much
for them) to make the necessary readjustments they are, to all intents
and purposes, impotent.)’’ (220). Williams’s comment places an intri-
guing political dimension on this artistic movement. He sees sharp
contrasts between the American and Russian sense of revolution: free-
dom versus denial of freedom; creation and superiority versus impo-
tence and castration. Serge Guilbault points out that for Williams ‘‘no
alliance was possible’’ between Marxism and the American tradition
(1983, 23). Based upon his comments to the National Institute of Arts
and Letters, Guilbault would no doubt count Williams among the new
liberals of the period. This group, according to Guilbault, ‘‘identified
with this art . . . because it embodied characteristics of international
modern painting (perceived as purely American)’’ and reflected values
of ‘‘individualism and the willingness to take risks’’ (200).
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For Williams, these American artists were attempting to fulfill a cul-

tural charge Emerson had heralded over a hundred years earlier. He
simply defended their right to do so. Years later he continued to reflect
upon that defense. He wrote Edward Dahlberg on February 19, 1958:
‘‘I am a member of The Institute of American Artists. Once 5 years
ago they asked me to read a paper on some phase of the current work
of our contemporary painters. I did so. I was not familiar with all they
were putting on canvas at the time, my theme was WAIT AND SEE,
meanwhile be generous, give them a chance to express themselves’’
(1958b, Edward Dahlberg Collection). This recollection reveals a tell-
ing point about his speech’s purpose. To him, it is absolutely essential
to demonstrate patience and generosity toward the artist if we are
truly to foster creativity in the United States. As the letter continues,
Williams describes the fallout for such an assertion: ‘‘Even while I was
talking the boos! began. I was furious and continued talking furiously.
A month following the talk there are those in the influential organiza-
tion who do not talk to me—so that following my stroke I do not go
to the meetings any more. Trala trala.’’
The resonance of those boos all these years later is quite telling.
Williams was injured standing up for these artists. They may never
have known it or even cared, but for Williams it wasn’t about the need
to be included in their circle. Rather, it was about his need to foster a
more welcoming atmosphere for the progression of an authentic
American artistry, even if he himself was not sure about the outcome.
In consideration of this later reminiscence, Williams’s address to the
National Institute was a significant public assertion of his views on Ab-
stract Expressionism. As an artistic movement, it did not have the
same impact on Williams’s poetry and technique as earlier move-
ments. However, it did have significance for him concerning what it
suggested about American art to be authentic and ‘‘new’’ and thus ful-
fill earlier cultural expectations.
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3
Imaginative ‘‘Blobs of Paint’’: Jackson Pollock
in the Work of Williams and O’Hara
TO DRAW PARALLELS BETWEEN WILLIAMS’S AND O’HARA’S WRITINGS

and the painting of Jackson Pollock is nothing new.1 Several critics
have offered some noteworthy studies regarding the ways that these
artists relate to one another. For instance, Joan Burbick’s ‘‘Grimmaces
of a New Age: The Postwar Poetry and Painting of William Carlos
Williams and Jackson Pollock’’ conjectures that ‘‘[t]he reason for this
alignment . . . [of Williams and Pollock], rests not so much on histori-
cal influences as on a shared sensibility that resulted in similar experi-
mentation with compositional technique’’ (1982, 110).Valerie
Robillard builds upon Burbick’s work and explores what she describes
as ‘‘the ritualistic images’’ found in their work (2002, 137). David
Sweet offers a different slant in his study; he brings O’Hara into the
discussion and concludes that O’Hara’s famous ‘‘I do this I do that
poems’’ are ‘‘Action Poems; yet they are completely personal and
new—a leap into the unknown, not an imitation’’ (2000, 387). These
earlier studies provided the critical groundwork for my own explora-
tion of Williams and O’Hara’s responses to Pollock.
As all now acknowledge, Abstract Expressionism shifted the center
of the avant-garde from Paris to New York. This symbolic shift ful-
filled what Williams and others had been calling on artists to do for
years. For the first time, American artists appeared to take the lead in
the visual arts from their European counterparts. These artists were
reinventing what was perceived as ‘‘painting.’’ Because of the notori-
ety of his method and his paintings, Jackson Pollock became renowned
as one of the leaders of the movement.
While Williams’s promotion of ‘‘American’’ art and artists is clear,
O’Hara appears more resistant to such nationalistic labels. In respond-
ing to questions from Lucie-Smith about an ‘‘American flavor’’ or tra-
dition in art, O’Hara clearly rejects such labels: ‘‘I think Pollock was
72
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3: IMAGINATIVE ‘‘BLOBS OF PAINT’’ 73
absolutely right when he said . . . there is no such thing as American

painting or any other kind of painting. There is good painting’’ (1983,
7). Pollock, in fact, claimed in a statement for the journal Arts and Ar-
chitecture, ‘‘The idea of an isolated American painting . . . just as the
idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem
absurd’’ (Karmel 1999, 16). Yet in continuing his answer, Pollock con-
nects the creation to the artist’s cultural origins: ‘‘An American is an
American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact,
whether he wills it or not’’ (16). For Pollock, the dilemma facing con-
temporary artists was global, regardless of the local imprint on its ar-
tistic production. Much like Williams and even O’Hara, he did not
feel an overwhelming desire to expatriate. In 1946 he wrote to a
friend, ‘‘Everyone is going or gone to Paris. With the old shit (that
you can’t paint in America) have an idea they will all be back’’ (Landau
1989, 244). Art historian Ellen Landau, in fact, credits him with shift-
ing the avant-garde to New York. ‘‘I don’t see,’’ Pollock ultimately
concludes, ‘‘why the problem of modern painting can’t be solved as
well here as elsewhere’’ (Karmel 1999, 15).
In probing O’Hara’s writings further, he does identify a quality in-
trinsic to American art. In the essay ‘‘American Art and Non-Ameri-
can Art,’’ O’Hara relates American artistry to the new (an idea
repeatedly stressed by Williams): ‘‘So far as I can see lately, what we
mean by American art is . . . simply avant-garde art’’ (1983, 97). As
O’Hara continues his explanation, he grounds his answer in relation
to the New York locale: ‘‘Europeans often find contemporary Ameri-
can art violent. I don’t, but violence is the atmosphere in which much
of it is created and which makes its commitment extreme and serious.
New York is one of the most violent cities in the world and its pace is
hectic. What can survive must have had some quality’’ (97). As much
as O’Hara doesn’t want to make cultural distinctions about art, he
does slip into this mode of thinking. Later on, when concluding the
essay, he makes this final summation: ‘‘[I]f there really is such a thing
as American painting, I think it can only be because for the first time
in our history an art is appearing which is aware of the rest of the
world in a non-imitative way. And the more naked we get, the more
clearly we will be seen to be ourselves. Why should we be ashamed?
The French aren’t ashamed of being French’’ (98). Such lines corre-
late to the prevailing view that Abstract Expressionism signals, for the
first time, the emergence of American art as a setter of artistic trends
and style. To achieve this, O’Hara rightly points out that those Ameri-
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can painters had to break from imitation and embrace their own cul-
tural origins.
O’Hara’s attitude toward the American art scene is also evident in
an intriguing episode related to the republication of his ‘‘Poem’’
(‘‘The eager note on my door said, ‘Call me . . .’ ’’) in New World Writ-
ing. After the acceptance of his submission, O’Hara wrote to Mrs. Por-
ter, executive editor of the New American Library.2 He earnestly
sought work as a reviewer: ‘‘I could write interestingly about poetry,
novels, music, I think,—and I’d be very eager to do art criticism, espe-
cially reviews of current exhibitions in New York’’ (1951a, New World
Writing). O’Hara’s pitch to Porter reflects his eagerness and enthusi-
asm for the artistry of his era; he also takes the opportunity to recom-
mend the work of his friends Violet Lang and John Ashbery. Of
special note for this study, O’Hara offers Porter a compelling assess-
ment of contemporary American art: ‘‘the center of the art world is
now New York rather than Paris, and one could write with sufficient
relaxation to avoid scaring the public, without however permitting the
public a false sense of familiarity towards the ‘all over painting’ or
American Expressionism or any of the other trends which seem at an
interesting period of maturity.’’ In this way, he proposes himself as the
perfect middleman for cultivating an appreciation among the public
for what is occurring in American art. Unfortunately Porter wrote
back and informed O’Hara that New World Writing had no need for
his skills at that time.
A more creative commentary about the American art scene occurs
in Kenneth Koch, a tragedy, a play O’Hara cowrote with Larry Rivers.
The play offers a spoof on the New York artists as experienced by the
poet Koch. Other true-to-life characters appear in the play, including
Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. At one point a
foul-mouthed Pollock engages in a heated exchange with Koch:
Jackson Pollock: Fuck you. (Turning to KK) My wife is a lousy lay, but
you’re the worst.
Kenneth: You’re a bald-headed idiot, and a perfect example of what I
mean. America is very strong, but all it amounts to is action. You’re
about as necessary as an automatic salt shaker. But don’t mistake me, I
love your painting.
Jackson Pollock: Shit.
Kenneth: How can we tell today? That’s the tragedy, Jackson. I’m sorry I
called you baldy. Were you serious about me? (1997, 129)
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Despite the obvious humor, this fictionalized argument points out the
paradoxical nature of Pollock’s value in cultural terms. Rivers and
O’Hara correlate the ‘‘American’’ qualities of action and strength with
Pollock—qualities that engender questionable results. Then, they
playfully compare Pollock’s value to an automatic salt shaker—a prod-
uct reflective of the gimmickry of American culture, nothing more.
Rivers and O’Hara even attempt to poke fun at themselves through
these characters. Kenneth exclaims that they wouldn’t talk that way ‘‘if
Larry or Frank were here’’ (130).
Jackson Pollock: Those fags.

Franz Kline: Those dope addicts.
Rivers and O’Hara’s sketch offers an intriguing parody of the personal

and artistic dynamics in the New York art scene. These dynamics, re-
sulting in both artistic collaboration and friction, made New York the
center for creativity and newness.
A Point of Contact: The Evergreen Review
As suggested earlier, there is nothing new in connecting either Wil-

liams and Pollock or O’Hara and Pollock. By examining the ways that
both poets respond to Pollock, however, it becomes possible to see a
unique tie that binds these poets to each other and that informs their
creative approaches and productions. With that said, I want to begin
this study of the poets and abstract art at its most tangible point—
volume 1 issue number 3 of the 1957 Evergreen Review. All three artists
are represented here. Along with several Hans Namuth photographs
of Pollock, appears O’Hara’s much-anthologized poem, ‘‘A Step Away
from Them.’’ It contains the famous lines:
. . . First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
(1995, 258)
O’Hara’s poem—complete with laborers wearing yellow helmets and

a clicking blonde chorus girl—captures, for the speaker, the beauty,
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diversity, and vitality of the moment. O’Hara frames the moment with
the tragic deaths of fellow friends and artists, including the recently
deceased Pollock.3 The poem offers a wonderful starting point for an
exploration of O’Hara and Pollock’s shared artistic sensibilities. Its
quick pace, through the use of short lines and enjambment, poetically
evokes the dynamism and lyricism evident in a painting like Pollock’s
Summertime: Number 9A, 1948. Like the painting, O’Hara’s energetic
lines draw you along. Its images of masculinity (laborers) and charged
sexuality (the Negro and chorus girl) again call to mind the iconic
American painter, as well as the rhythmic physicality of his painterly
technique. One need only look as far as the Namuth photos in the
Evergreen Review to see such images on display: the cover shows the
rebellious American painter wearing jeans in front of his beat up truck;
another shot depicts the artist at work ‘‘in’’ his painting. The speaker
in the poem, like Pollock, straddles two worlds. One world is popu-
lated by a ‘‘lady in foxes’’ who ‘‘puts her poodle / in a cab’’ (O’Hara
1995, 258). In the other world, one can purchase a cheeseburger and
chocolate malted. Perhaps the most intriguing reference made in
O’Hara’s poem is to the Manhattan Storage Warehouse: the speaker
notes that the building will soon be destroyed (which is yet another
death). He admits, ‘‘I / used to think they had the Armory / Show
there’’ (258). His mistaken assumption invokes the famed 1913 Ar-
mory Show, a seminal event in modern American art that caused Wil-
liams, as he says, to laugh ‘‘out loud . . . happily, with relief’’ (1951a,
134). Geoff Ward notes this connection and argues that the poem is
‘‘influenced by Williams at the levels of style, literary allusion and cul-
tural matrix’’ (2001, 57). Like O’Hara’s speaker, Williams may have
faulty memories with the show. Yet O’Hara’s reference to this event in
a poem written shortly after Pollock’s death amalgamates avant-garde
achievement in American cultural history.
In this Evergreen Review issue, O’Hara also published ‘‘Why I Am
Not a Painter’’ and ‘‘On Rachmaninoff’s Birthday (Quick! A last poem
before I go).’’ The former poem functions as O’Hara’s poetic declara-
tion: ‘‘I am not a painter, I am a poet’’ (1995, 261). Notably, like Wil-
liams, O’Hara defines himself in the context of the visual arts. He even
admits, ‘‘I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.’’ The
poem then chronicles O’Hara’s visit with Mike Goldberg who tells
him that he added sardines to his painting because ‘‘it needed some-
thing there.’’ When O’Hara stops days later, Goldberg has removed
the sardines telling O’Hara ‘‘It was too much.’’ After this brief narra-
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tive, O’Hara then describes his own creation of ‘‘Oranges.’’ He con-

cludes,
. . . My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
(262)
In these lines, O’Hara identifies a distinction in the mediums, yet he

also identifies a commonality in the artistic process. Through the
making of his poem, he learns to value his medium: ‘‘There should
be / so much more, not of orange, of / words.’’ Such a discovery en-
ables him to declare—‘‘I am a real poet.’’
O’Hara’s poem offers several key parallels to Abstract Expression-
ism. Barbara Guest describes it as ‘‘an exact statement of an Abstract
Expressionist principle. . . . [It] is about the importance of not having
a subject’’ (Lehman 1998, 344). David Lehman points out that O’Hara
actually feigns spontaneity in this poem (The poem ‘‘Oranges,’’ in
fact, precedes his friendship with Goldberg.) Thus, it reflects another
Abstract Expressionist ‘‘lesson’’: ‘‘What looks spontaneous may really
be the product of a calculation’’ (344). This point became increasingly
important to Pollock amid criticism of the chaotic nature of his work.
In response to Time’s 1950 article on him entitled ‘‘Chaos, Damn It!,’’
Pollock wrote a letter to the editor claiming, ‘‘NO CHAOS DAMN
IT. DAMNED BUSY PAINTING’’ (Karmel 1999, 71). As he ex-
plained in an interview with William Wright, ‘‘with experience—it
seems to be possible to control the flow of the paint, to a great
extent . . . I don’t use the accident—‘cause I deny the accident’’ (1999,
22).
Considering his admiration of Williams, O’Hara must have been
thrilled with Allen’s placement of his poem right next to Williams’s
‘‘View of a Woman at Her Bath.’’ In the context of this study, their
appearance on facing pages serves to concretize the poetic link be-
tween them. The other O’Hara poem appearing in the magazine, ‘‘On
Rachmaninoff’s Birthday,’’ actually evokes the older Williams in his
line, tone, and aesthetic of ‘‘things’’:
. . . Oh my palace of oranges,
junk shop, staples, umber, basalt;
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I’m a child again when I was really

miserable, a grope pizzicato. My pocket
of rhinestone, yoyo, carpenter’s pencil,
amethyst, hypo, campaign button,
is the room full of smoke? Shit
on the soup, let it burn. . . .
(1995, 159)
Ward, referencing Koch’s praise of O’Hara’s ‘‘things,’’ concludes that

O’Hara ‘‘bestows approbation on what is basically a continuation by
O’Hara of Williams’ aesthetic of inclusion’’ (2001, 53). In an issue
seemingly commemorating the rebellious and imaginative Pollock,
the inclusion of O’Hara and Williams certainly offers a memorable
display of American avant-garde poetry.4
The use of things evident in O’Hara’s poem, which is also a staple
in Williams’s verse, offers an intriguing correlation to Pollock, spe-
cifically I have in mind his landmark Full Fathom Five, 1947. The
painting emerges from Pollock’s highly productive period 1947–50,
what O’Hara defines as the ‘‘classical period of Pollock’’ (1975, 30).
The painting’s title alludes to Shakespeare’s Tempest, as well as Joyce’s
Ulysses.5 The novel has been documented as an important work to Pol-
lock, Williams, and O’Hara.6 ‘‘There is a defiance of tradition on each
page of Ulysses,’’ Ellen Landau writes, ‘‘which equates directly with
Pollock’s new approach to painting’’ (1989, 174). The painting reflects
Pollock’s pouring technique and ‘‘allover’’ design. Unlike a larger
sized painting like Summertime Number 9A, 1948, Full Fathom Five (50
7/8 x 30 1/8 in.) appears on a relatively smaller canvas. That size seem-
ingly contributes to the painting’s unity and intensity. Pollock’s inter-
lacing of green, black, and silver lines with dynamic marks of orange,
yellow, and purple creates a forceful, swirling effect. Along with these
energetic lines and pulsating colors, Pollock adds surface depth to the
painting by enveloping various objects onto the canvas—nails, ciga-
rettes, matches, tacks, and buttons to name a few. ‘‘These objects were
not obtrusive in the design,’’ Landau contends, ‘‘and Pollock allowed
them to retain their individuality despite their transformed role’’
(1989, 174). Landau’s description of this transformation parallels what
happens to ‘‘things’’ that O’Hara and Williams make use of in the de-
sign of their own poems. Such an approach again reflects a perceptive
ability to enfold even the most common and base materials into art.
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Now it never appears that Williams met Pollock, but O’Hara did
run into him a few times at the Cedar Tavern. There is, in fact, a leg-
endary incident at the Cedar when Pollock called O’Hara a ‘‘fag’’
(Gooch 1993, 204), alluded to earlier in Kenneth Koch, a tragedy. An-
other time O’Hara reportedly exited the bar when he heard Pollock
was on yet another ‘‘drunken rampage’’ (204). Yet O’Hara enjoyed fre-
quenting the painter’s hangouts: ‘‘if Jackson Pollock tore the door off
the men’s room in the Cedar it was something he just did and was
interesting, not an annoyance. You couldn’t see into it anyway, and
besides there was then a sense of genius’’ (O’Hara 1983, 169). Despite
these troubling anecdotes of homophobia and violence, O’Hara
clearly revered Pollock as a painter. In fact, while working on a retro-
spective exhibition of Pollock for the fourth Bienal in São Paulo in
1957, he wrote to Ashbery, ‘‘How great he is! I got to select the exhibi-
tion myself’’ (Gooch 1993, 295). The exhibition actually garnered a
‘‘special commendation’’ and was, according to Gooch, O’Hara’s
‘‘first curatorial success.’’
Artists ‘‘In’’ Their Work
Despite minimal evidence regarding Pollock’s interest in either

poet, it still remains possible to examine his thoughts about artistry as
a way of paralleling him to O’Hara and Williams.7 For the magazine
Possibilities, edited by Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, Pollock de-
scribes his technique this way: ‘‘I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas
to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface.
On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the paint-
ing, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and
literally be in the painting’’ (Karmel 1999, 17). Pollock does not claim
originality for this technique—he quickly remarks that western Indi-
ans had practiced this approach. What is noteworthy in the context of
Williams and O’Hara is that Pollock’s strategy of being ‘‘in’’ the
painting simulates what Williams had been doing in his poetry for
years and what O’Hara later mastered. You often have both poets ‘‘in’’
their poems without overwhelming them and rendering them ‘‘con-
fessional.’’ For example, in an early poem entitled ‘‘The Young
Housewife’’ (1916), Williams situates us, much like O’Hara would
later do, at a specific time:
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At ten a.m. the young housewife

moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
(1986, 57)
Although the speaker is ‘‘in’’ the poem, the structure of the stanza re-
flects the division he feels from the scene described. In the next sec-
tion, she appears ‘‘shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray ends of hair.’’
The speaker then self-consciously describes his attempt at creation—
‘‘and I compare her / to a fallen leaf.’’ By offering such explicit com-
mentary on his process of seeing this young woman, the speaker / poet
conveys what makes him different from the ‘‘ice-man’’ and ‘‘fish-man’’
that act almost robotically in response to her call. He literally can be
more independent, more creative in his actions concerning her. Such
a self-conscious expression of the creative process also permeates
O’Hara’s verse. According to Raphael Schulte, O’Hara and other New
York poets ‘‘focused on the relationship between the surface of their
writings and their own artistic involvement and processes during the
writing of poems’’ (1999, 47). Almost forty years earlier Williams had
done the same thing.
The third and shortest stanza of Williams’s poem moves beyond the
self-conscious comparison to describe the momentary contact be-
tween the speaker and the woman—a moment Williams manages to
express as it occurs—
The noiseless wheels of my car

rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
(1986, 57)
Unlike many of O’Hara’s more famous poems, which not only place
you at a specific time and specific locale, Williams’s poem can be situ-
ated on almost any street. Through a curious juxtaposition of silence
and sounds, images and imaginings, he thus invites readers to partici-
pate in this intimate moment of contact.
Earlier I mentioned Harold Rosenberg’s essay ‘‘The American Ac-
tion Painters’’ and its possible roots in Williams’s ‘‘The Poem as a
Field of Action.’’ Along with Rosenberg’s oft quoted description of
the canvas as ‘‘an arena in which to act,’’ he describes the concurrent
meanings intrinsic to a ‘‘moment’’ of painterly action. He explains,
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‘‘The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his

life—whether ‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spot-
ting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in
sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance
as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every dis-
tinction between art and life’’ (1965, 27–28). In this way, the action
painting releases the ‘‘artist’s individual possibilities.’’ It also invites
the viewer to participate imaginatively in the subtle nuances of sponta-
neity and design intrinsic to this creative moment. It seems to me that
in an early poem like ‘‘The Young Housewife’’ Williams achieves such
an effect.
In a later poem, ‘‘The Right of Way’’ (1923), Williams describes
another scene that he is a part of and apart from. Again, he sets his
poem in action-oriented space—‘‘the right of way’’ on the road. By
the ‘‘virtue of the law,’’ the speaker can ‘‘enjoy’’ this place (1986, 205),
which currently preoccupies his imaginative focus. Such a poem
achieves its pace through Williams’s tightly constructed short lines
and enjambment. It recreates the speaker’s imaginative motion—the
‘‘passing’’ of his mind—and the corresponding images that bombard
his eyes. In this transitory space, he observes a smiling ‘‘elderly man,’’
a laughing ‘‘woman in blue,’’ and ‘‘a boy of eight’’ (1986, 205–6). De-
spite the unity of the scene, each looks in a different direction. The
elderly man ‘‘looked away’’ from the others; meanwhile, the woman
‘‘look[s] up’’ into the man’s face while the boy stares ‘‘looking’’ at a
watchchain upon ‘‘the man’s belly.’’ In contrast to an earlier poem like
‘‘Pastoral’’ that directly asserts the scene’s cultural significance, this
poem ambiguously asserts the ‘‘supreme importance’’ of this ‘‘name-
less spectacle.’’ The moment is indeed important and evades quick
categorization from a speaker who also looks, but moves past them
‘‘without a word.’’ Witnessing this moment, though, does affect him
as he continues to drive: ‘‘Why bother where I went?’’ (206). He be-
comes one with the ‘‘spinning’’ of his car and the ‘‘wet road.’’ This
lasts until, as he states, ‘‘I saw a girl with one leg / over the rail of a
balcony.’’ Once again, his insularity and confinement get disrupted
when looking upon an arresting and ambiguous image. Is the girl dis-
figured? Suicidal? Stealing away? Tempting? This time he doesn’t
even allude to the image’s ‘‘supreme importance’’; rather, the image
has the profound effect of concluding the poem, even eluding the con-
finement of punctuation.8
O’Hara appears in more personal terms than Williams throughout
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what he labels his ‘‘I do this, I do that’’ poems. He understood what

painters like Pollock offered poets: ‘‘I think certain poets have been
very much inspired by American painting. You know, not in the sense
of subject matter, or anything like that, but in the ambition to be that,
to be the work yourself, and therefore accomplish it’’ (1983, 17).
O’Hara pulls this off masterfully. For instance, in the aforementioned
‘‘Why I Am Not a Painter,’’ he continually plays upon the idea of
being ‘‘in’’ the poem—whether it’s stopping ‘‘in’’ at Mike’s, the gal-
lery, or even his own poem (1995, 261–62). According to Sweet,
‘‘O’Hara uses his immediate situation to shatter the edifice of the self-
portrait. In this way, he avoids the trap of confessional poetry’’ (2000,
386). Such an approach engenders uniqueness. In trying to elucidate
the painter’s influence, John Ashbery suggests that they offered ‘‘ab-
stract truths’’: ‘‘something like Be yourself . . . nobody ever thought
he would scatter words over a page the way Pollock scattered his drip-
s’’(Ferguson 1999, 25). By ‘‘being in the poem’’ therefore, O’Hara,
like Williams, creates not only a work identifiable with him, but also a
revelatory poem available for other readers to experience imagina-
tively.
In his 1947 essay ‘‘Revelation,’’ Williams articulates this goal. He
says, ‘‘[t]he objective in writing is, to reveal. It is not to teach, not to
advertise, not to sell, not even to communicate (for that needs two) but
to reveal, which needs no other than the man himself’’ (1954, 268).
Williams’s idea seems related to what a poem like ‘‘The Right of
Way’’ achieves—its grounding in the ordinary, yet through imagina-
tive contact it celebrates a ‘‘nameless spectacle.’’ O’Hara subscribes to
this artistic objective, as evident in his review of John Rechy’s City of
Night, which he claims falls short of such revelation (1983, 163). Con-
versely in his poem ‘‘Digression on ‘Number 1,’ 1948,’’ he represents
Pollock’s accomplishment of it. In typical O’Hara fashion, he de-
scribes a day in the life. Yet on this day he is ill, but maybe, as he says,
‘‘not too ill’’ (1995, 260). This correction of his state of well-being is
important to note. As Libby suggests, ‘‘What is ‘corrected’ is not
erased, not completely painted over, but left to enrich the general tex-
ture; the sense of acting personality comes from the poet’s constant
movement through various perspectives’’ (1990, 146). This contradic-
toriness reveals a genuine complexity in the speaker. Despite such
contradictions, ‘‘warm / for winter, cold for fall,’’ he asserts that it’s
‘‘A fine day for seeing’’ (1995, 260). What he sees are works by Miró,
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Léger, and Picasso. The poem shifts dramatically upon the encounter
with Pollock’s oil on canvas:
There is the Pollock, white, harm

will not fall, his perfect hand
and the many short voyages. They’ll

never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.
(260)
The reference to the Pollock, as compared to the other works, privi-

leges its effect on the speaker. The painting itself is notable for its size
(68 8⬘8), reflecting Pollock’s exploration of larger canvases. The
painting also includes handprints upon several edges. Several critics
have noted this as further evidence of Pollock’s presence in the paint-
ing, an incarnation of his earlier statement for Possibilities.9 O’Hara’s
speaker himself seems particularly drawn to that outlying image, as
suggested in the reference to ‘‘his perfect hand.’’ It’s worthwhile to
note that in his Pollock monograph O’Hara describes the actual hand-
prints of the painting as ‘‘the seemingly bloodstained hands of the
painter’’ and they function as ‘‘a postscript to a terrible experience’’
(1975, 31). Considering such a reading, the speaker’s identification
with this painting suggests something of his own ‘‘dark’’ feelings and
experiences on this day.
Despite this darkness, though, Pollock’s expansive creative expres-
sion offers the poet a means to ‘‘see’’ the world in a way that dramati-
cally bolsters and re-energizes him. In Pollock’s painting, he sees an
imagination refusing to be fenced in by traditional expectations and
limitations. The largeness of the canvas draws in the spectator, almost
consumes him. Upon closer exploration, one perceives the subtle use
of color—yellows amid the more dominant bluish-gray, black, and
white. The painting itself offers an energetic interweaving of line and
color that emits both force and gracefulness. In describing Pollock’s
line, Michael Fried draws upon the paintings optical power: ‘‘It is a
kind of space-filling curve of immense complexity, responsive to the
slightest impulse of the painter and responsive as well, one almost
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feels, to one’s own act of looking’’ (2005, 257). This reading seems
true in the case of O’Hara’s poem. Both painting and poem reveal the
power of such art to move us beyond our own isolation. O’Hara offers
a telling statement about Pollock’s work from this period: ‘‘It is about
what we see, about what we can see. In the works of this period we are
not concerned with possibility, but actuality’’ (1975, 32).10 Number 1,
1948 offers him such an actuality.
Action Artistry
Action and revelation seem linked in the works discussed so far. The
two Williams poems previously cited offer instances of action-ori-
ented poetry. Another poem, ‘‘January Morning: Suite’’ offers another
compelling example of this aesthetic. The poem features a ferry ride
on the Hudson River during an early January morning. The speaker,
although not in ‘‘real time’’ at the poem’s opening, depicts various
local images the speaker finally seems to be able to see. Because it is
early morning, ‘‘the domes of the Church of / the Paulist Fathers in
Weehawken’’ can be seen as ‘‘beautiful as Saint Peters / approached
after years of anticipation’’ (1986, 100).
Unashamedly the speaker compares the new world with the old,
thus deconstructing a hierarchal privilege of traditional aesthetics and
creating an opening for seeing different types of beauty. John Lowney
puts the importance of the scene this way: it ‘‘affirms the aesthetic
value of New World spontaneity, contrasted to the more rational Old
World ‘anticipation’ ’’ (1997, 33). It is this ‘‘discovery’’ of the local
beauty that heightens the speaker’s attentiveness to detail and enables
him to record more keenly what he sees—‘‘the tall probationers,’’ ‘‘a
young horse with a green bed-quilt,’’ and ‘‘dirt-colored men / about a
fire bursting from an old / ash can’’ (Williams, 1986, 101). The poet’s
eye does not discriminate between the moving images that he sees—
the sacredness of the church is no more valued than the vision of the
horse. According to poet/critic David Young, this series of images is
comparable to ‘‘turning the pages of a sketchbook, inspecting a display
of photographs, or watching a film . . . All the analogies involve a sense
of movement, one that feels rapid and energetic’’ (2006, 72).
The movement of the ferry, ironically called Arden, seems to shift
the speaker from what he ‘‘saw’’ to what he ‘‘is.’’ Section X declares
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The young doctor is dancing with happiness

in the sparkling wind, alone
at the prow of the ferry! . . .
(1986, 102)
The transformation, as evident through the exclamation points

throughout the stanza, marks the speaker’s exuberance in this mo-
ment. Despite the immediate unattractiveness of the things he notices,
‘‘curdy barnacles’’ and ‘‘broken ice crusts,’’ the doctor’s imagination is
triggered and acutely alive. The perception of the movements sur-
rounding him results in his own celebratory rhythmic motion. In the
next section, he asserts what he now knows—there is something be-
yond the largeness of ‘‘the moody / water-loving giants of Manhattan’’
(103). There is ‘‘the Palisades,’’ the break of the river, and those ‘‘little
peering houses that brighten / with dawn.’’
These active moving images—the boat, the dancing doctor, the
‘‘sparkling wind’’—are subsequently framed by death in section XIII:
Work hard all your young days

and they’ll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul—
out!
—among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.
(103)
The use of that personal pronoun ‘‘you’’ creates ambiguity about the
reference—is it the young doctor or the reader being addressed? Ei-
ther way you read it, death—an assured feature of the human condi-
tion—touches us all, poet and reader alike. Later on in the poem, the
‘‘flapping flags’’ are at half-mast for the more famous ‘‘dead admiral.’’
Young notes, ‘‘death is still something final, however marked or com-
memorated’’ (2006, 86). The speaker’s recognition of this truth ulti-
mately enables a more powerful contact with these momentary
impressions.
The finality and connectivity of death, especially in relation to fa-
mous personages, is evident in one of O’Hara’s most famous ‘‘I do
this, I do that’’ poems, ‘‘The Day Lady Died.’’ In this poem, O’Hara
recounts the lunch time errands he makes on July 17, 1959. His prepa-
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ration for the weekend includes a shoeshine and lunch, as well as fairly
routine stops at the bank, the Golden Griffin, and the Park Lane Li-
quor Store. Yet in the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre, he experi-
ences a profound moment. It’s there where he ‘‘casually’’ asks for a
carton of Galuloises and Picayunes:
. . . and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
(1995, 325)
The news of this day—Billie Holiday’s death—stops the poet. The

death crystallizes the significance of this actual moment. O’Hara man-
ages to draw us into his particular experience—complete with a mem-
ory of her singing. The once rapid pace of the poem slows down
significantly, and O’Hara masterfully connects us all, poet, dead
singer, and reader, to the moment when ‘‘everyone and I stopped
breathing.’’ In this way O’Hara transcribes the news of his day into
news for all days, not solely about Holiday’s death, but about the po-
tential of art—her song/his poem—to connect us all in the moment.
It epitomizes Williams’s comment on artistic creation in Spring and
All. ‘‘[T]he artist does exactly what every eye must do with life,’’ Wil-
liams explains, ‘‘fix the particular with the universality of his own’’
(1986, 193). O’Hara’s poem expresses this idea. His particular lunch
hour experiences connect to those beyond his immediate experience
of that Friday afternoon. He offers the reader a chance to, as Williams
says in Kora in Hell, ‘‘mingle in the dance’’ of imagination (1970, 59).
Williams’s ‘‘January Morning,’’ which is not as compact as O’Hara’s
poem, clearly does not have the same dramatic impact as O’Hara’s dis-
covery of Holiday’s death. Yet there is that same awareness of death
amid life that causes the poet to be arrested in his contemplation and
expression of the moment. Also, there is that transcendent sense of
momentary connectivity through death. Even people like the great ad-
miral and the great Billie Holiday die—that’s part of what heightens
the actual significance of the moment. Young asserts the following in
regard to Williams’s poem: ‘‘We die, all of us, as individuals. Yet some-
thing persists, something lives on, connecting us to the light and
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movement that exist around us in the seasons and cities we inhabit’’

(2006, 86–87). Young’s almost Emersonian expression, highlights the
import of movement not only in Williams’s poem, but in a poem like
O’Hara’s that focuses so intensely on time, movement, and death.
The final section (XV) of ‘‘January Morning’’ pays tribute to a spe-
cific woman, noted in drafts as ‘‘Mother’’ (1986, 489). Although the
opening lines of this section are directed at the old woman, they seem
to speak to those who may be entrenched in the old ways of thinking
about poetry and art.
I wanted to write a poem

that you could understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can’t understand it?
But you got to try hard—
(103–4)
It’s clear through this direct remark that Williams wants to engage
his readers. Yet, he also demands that they equal this effort. He then
describes himself with a curious comparison to ‘‘young girls [who] run
giggling / on Park Avenue after dark’’ (104). This self-description con-
trasts with the staid older woman who presides at the opening of the
section. It projects a sense of rebellion, action, and quickness. For
David Young, this poem is representative of Williams’s aesthetic: ‘‘If
his poems are machines made out of words, they tend to be built for
speed. His line, his diction, his handling of form, and even his punctu-
ation all contribute to our sense that his poems reflect the restless,
rapid pace of modern American life, a world of business, hurry, and
constant change’’ (2006, 73). Young has it right. In fact, his close read-
ing of this poem illustrates how necessary it is to understand Wil-
liams’s aesthetic of motion and immediacy.
As evident in these poems, action plays a central role in the Wil-
liams and O’Hara poetic aesthetic. To heighten its value to these poets
and to Pollock, it may help to refer again to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Art historian Matthew Baigell offers an intriguing reading of action
in accordance with Emersonian thinking. ‘‘For Pollock,’’ he argues,
‘‘action was important because it underlined his active presence’’
(2001, 145). He then cites the following lines from Emerson’s ‘‘Self-
Reliance’’ as an explanation for such action-oriented paintings:
‘‘Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of
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transition from a past to a new state’’ (129). He goes on to cite Emer-

son’s further assertion ‘‘that the soul becomes’’ as he explains that
these paintings offer evidence of ‘‘Pollock’s soul in the process of be-
coming . . . in discovering its own qualities, its own powers, its own
true voice.’’ Although I value Professor Baigell’s reading of Pollock’s
drip paintings in the context of Emerson’s essay, I am hesitant to ex-
tend the point fully to Williams or O’Hara. To me, neither poet seems
to achieve that same mystical sense of ‘‘becoming’’ through his poems.
Nevertheless, that sense of power through action and stasis through
repose seems a fundamental feature of the creative process inherent in
these men and their artistry.
‘‘Against the Weather,’’ an essay Williams published in 1939, ex-
presses some further parallels between Williams and Pollock’s action
artistry. For starters, Williams touts the importance of the artist in ac-
tion-oriented terms. He claims, ‘‘The artist is to be understood not as
occupying some outlying section of the field of action but the whole
field’’ (1969, 197). One thinks of Pollock’s action-oriented technique
emphasizing directness, movement, and space—the painter’s presence
in his work. In language that seems inspired by Emerson’s ‘‘The
American Scholar,’’ Williams explains that ‘‘[t]he artist is to be con-
ceived as a universal man of action—restricted by circumstances to a
field in which only he can remain alive, whole and effective.’’ Yet in
contrast to Emerson’s advocacy for the liberating power of symbols,
Williams maintains that the artist ‘‘does not translate the sensuality of
his materials into symbols but deals with them directly. By this he be-
longs to his world and time, sensually, realistically’’ (197). A work like
Pollock’s Full Fathom Five, with its use of disparate materials enfolded
upon the canvas, almost seems to enact Williams’s idea.
Williams’s ‘‘The Non-Entity’’ (1950), a poem written at the height
of Pollock’s artistry, even evokes qualities of action painting. The
opening stanza portrays vivid images of ‘‘cramped’’ trees in descriptive
color (‘‘rusty-gold green’’) and definable shapes (‘‘cone-shaped’’). In
the second stanza, the focus narrows to ‘‘a maple solitary / upon the
wood’s face’’ (1988, 225). Toward the conclusion of the stanza, the
ocean becomes an active creating force that ‘‘roars’’ and ‘‘rocks’’
the mind, janistically

pours autumn, shaking nerves
of color over it
(225)
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The ocean’s power is evocative here as action verbs dominate the

lines. The final stanza in particular invokes an image of the ocean as a
Pollock-like action painter. For starters, though, it is necessary to con-
sider the complicated term ‘‘janistically.’’ Chris MacGowan notes that
it is a ‘‘non-word’’ and suggests that Williams may have intended ‘‘jan-
senistically,’’ a term related to Jansenism and the denial of free will
(1984, 484).11 Building from that suggestion, the use of the word may
imply that the creative force here asserts control of the pouring that
takes place. Pollock, it should be recalled, denied the accident. The
ensuing expression, ‘‘pours autumn,’’ conjures up Pollock’s technique,
particularly when associated with ‘‘shaking nerves / of color.’’ Wil-
liams often used the term ‘‘nerves’’ in connection with the Abstract
Expressionists, most notably Pollock, to portray what he perceived as
a Freudian-inspired process of painting. In the context of Williams’s
poem, it’s also worth mentioning Pollock’s famous response to Hans
Hoffman’s critique of his work. ‘‘You do not work from nature,’’ Hoff-
man reportedly remarked to Pollock (Karmel 1999, 28). Pollock’s re-
tort—‘‘I am Nature’’—expresses a surety in his artistic powers and the
work he has been creating. As Carter Ratcliff points out, such a claim
was not new with Pollock: ‘‘authentic art is the work of those who
embody natural forces’’ (1996, 69). Williams’s poem expresses that
sense of authentic expression derived from a Pollock-like technique.
In this way, he portrays a real imaginative force that ultimately ‘‘rocks
the mind.’’
The Need for Newness
For Williams, Pollock and these other abstractionists were respond-

ing to the challenge of representing the ‘‘newness’’ innately inherent
in modernity. In ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Action,’’ he describes it as
the need to find ‘‘a new measure or a new way of measuring that will
be commensurate with the social, economic world in which we are liv-
ing’’ (1969, 283). As previously discussed, he saw Motherwell honor-
ing this ‘‘new vision’’ in his medium (1978, 215). Jackson Pollock,
during a 1950 interview with William Wright, describes in Williams-
like fashion the same objective: ‘‘My opinion is that new needs need
new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new
means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern
painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the
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radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
Each age finds its own technique’’ (Karmel 1999, 20).
Williams’s appreciation for Pollock’s artistry becomes even clearer
when reading Paterson V. Here are some telling lines from part 1:
—the virgin and the whore, which

most endures? the world
of the imagination most endures:
Pollock’s blobs of paint squeezed out

with design!
pure from the tube. Nothing else
is real . .
(1992, 211)
Henry Sayre describes these lines as a ‘‘celebration of the plastic real-

ity of art’’ (1983, 126), one that Williams desired in his own verse.
‘‘The formal purity of poetry is achieved not in its saying,’’ Sayre
writes, ‘‘. . . but in its visual shaping’’ (126). In Williams’s lines, the
old poet identifies with Pollock’s later technique—one adopted after
critics felt his greatness ebbed. Elizabeth Frank, however, contends
that Pollock continued to experiment and push himself beyond his old
forms: ‘‘He took chances, and did not automatically rule out possibili-
ties, not only pouring but applying paint right from the tube in the
thick impasto of Number 28, 1951, and trailing yellow, red, blue, and
white over the complex black and white network of Convergence: Num-
ber 10, 1952’’ (1983, 97). By referencing this particular technique in
the above lines, the older Williams identifies with the younger paint-
er’s desire to push beyond artistic stagnancy. As he asserts in a note to
Paterson V, ‘‘I had to take the world of Paterson into a new dimension
if I wanted to give it imaginative validity’’ (1992, xv). Such a concept
seems related to another Emersonian ideal. In ‘‘Circles,’’ he describes
himself as ‘‘only an experimenter.’’ He writes, ‘‘I unsettle all things.
No facts to me are sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an
endless seeker, with no past at my back’’ (2001, 180). Such an experi-
mental pursuit—whether successful or not—remains evident not only
in Williams and Pollock’s works, but as we will come to see in David
Smith’s as well.
Notably Williams does not reference a particular Pollock painting,
but rather a figural representation of Pollock’s technique. In a section
of Paterson dominated by specific works of art—most notably the
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medieval Unicorn Tapestries and Brueghel’s The Adoration of the

Magi—this reference to technique takes on special significance, espe-
cially in regard to Williams’s attention to artistic making. In early
drafts of Book V, Williams does not identify the blobs of paint with
Pollock. When he first introduces the lines, handwritten on the mar-
gins, they appear as ‘‘a blob of paint squeezed pure from the tube’’
(Williams Papers).12 The use of the word ‘‘pure’’ has intriguing con-
notations given Williams’s past usage. In an earlier work The Embodi-
ment of Knowledge, Williams writes that ‘‘In painting, the pure is
design. It is painting itself’’ (117). He also relates this principle to the
notion of ‘‘pure writing,’’ which he sees as an art and quite distinct
from journalism. Ultimately, in Williams’s drafting of Paterson V, he
sought to identify this ‘‘pure’’ inherently artistic act with a specific art-
ist. In subsequent drafts, when introducing Pollock’s name, he also in-
troduced the concept of ‘‘design,’’ another crucial concept for both
painter and poet (Williams Papers).13
Later in his artistic life Williams desired to ‘‘fuse’’ the ‘‘design’’ of
poetry and painting as an ‘‘abstract work’’ (1976, 53). ‘‘[S]ometimes
when I write,’’ he told Walter Sutton, ‘‘I don’t want to say anything. I
just want to present it. . . . I don’t care whether it’s representational or
not.’’ He then went on to stress the importance of design in both
poetry and painting: ‘‘A design in the poem and a design in the picture
should make them more or less the same thing.’’ O’Hara seems partic-
ularly responsive to Williams’s concern with the concept of design, as
evident in his notes ‘‘Design etc.’’ for a 1952 talk at The Club (1983,
33). To differentiate his use of the term ‘‘design’’ from ‘‘form,’’ he
even used a Williams poem. He then offered the following definition:
. . . design is the point where the poet can hold his ground in the impasse
between formal smothering and emotional spilling over. In this sense de-
sign need not be apparent typographically, it is a clearheaded, poetry-re-
specting objectivity, without which the most sublime and inspired love
lyrics or hate-chants would be muddy rantings. As the poem is being writ-
ten, air comes in, and light, the form is loosened here and there, remarks
join the perhaps too consistently felt images, a rhyme becomes assonant
instead of regular, or avoided all together. . . . All these things help the
poem to mean only what it itself means, become its own poem, so to speak,
not the typical poem of a self-pitying or infatuated writer. (1983, 35)
O’Hara’s explanation offers some clarity to the shadowy ground that

exists between an adherence to form and a desire for spontaneity. The
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goal he articulates correlates with Williams’s well-known call to break

free from the constraints of formal structures. Nowhere is this clearer
than in Williams’s essay ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Action’’ (1948).
Here he asserts his desire ‘‘to find an objective way at least of looking
at verse and to redefine its elements’’ (1969, 286). For Williams this
redefinition seems rooted in the language, and offers the poet an ‘‘op-
portunity to expand the structure, the basis, the actual making of the
poem’’ (291).
For Williams, Pollock’s adherence to some aspect of design func-
tions as a critical feature for his own understanding and acceptance of
the painter’s style. As stated earlier, it is difficult to argue that Wil-
liams championed Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. In many ways,
though, he sees the artist and the movement as an outgrowth of earlier
modernist movements. An intriguing link to this notion appears in two
letters to Charles Sheeler from this period. In these letters, Williams
references both the imagery and ideas found in Paterson V. In the ear-
lier of the two letters (January 29, 1959), he correlates Sheeler with
the movement: ‘‘you were a pioneer in the dominence [sic] of abstract
color in your canvasses’’ (1959a, Sheeler Papers).14 As he elaborates,
though, he marks a distinction between Sheeler and these later paint-
ers: ‘‘You wanted structure in your objects until the abstractionist
come along with no relation to anything human. It is a further break-
down until nothing is left, no color but a blob, a Roarshk test, a study
of a man’s nervous system seen from the inside. It’s going a long way
to learn to relax the nerves. Maybe it’s worth it, I don’t know.’’ Obvi-
ously the image of the blob and its schizophrenic qualities offers a
blending of Williams’s earlier images and ideas related to Pollock.
Williams remains skeptical of such artistry, but he also leaves the door
open to its value.
In response to Williams’s comments and concerns, Sheeler shares
with Williams his own uncertainty over the abstractionist. In a June
10, 1959, letter written to Flossie, Sheeler writes, ‘‘I am as puzzled as
Bill by the present scene—the de Koonings, etc. etc. I don’t go farther
than saying I don’t understand. I don’t want to repeat the same mis-
takes that were made in the past when there are so many mistakes that
are different which can be made. . . . It seems the present can only be
evaluated in retrospect. I will have to continue in the small circle of
my belief for better or worse’’ (Williams Papers). Sheeler’s own puz-
zlement is important to note. As well respected as Williams is for his
artistic appreciation, he did not consider himself a painter. Conse-
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quently Sheeler’s admission puts Williams’s own uncertainty over Ab-

stract Expressionism in good company. Sheeler’s effort not to judge
also mirrors Williams’s own. Both older artists understand the dan-
gers of harsh, uninformed judgment on imaginative expression.
Another intriguing aspect of Williams’s letter to Sheeler is the dis-
tinction that he draws between Sheeler’s ‘‘structure’’ and the abstrac-
tionist lack of it. This idea runs counter to the concept of ‘‘design’’
that Williams appears to associate with Pollock in Paterson and that
Pollock insisted on to William Wright (‘‘I deny the accident’’). Yet in
a later letter to Sheeler, dated June 8, 1959, Williams offers a more
direct, fuller explanation of his belief in design and abstraction. The
letter begins by establishing common ground between Ben Shahn and
Sheeler: ‘‘his head was clear, as yours is clear in the matter of design
and if painting is not a matter of design primarily it looses half its ef-
fectiveness’’ (1959b, Sheeler Papers). Williams then relays Edith
Halpert and Henry Niese’s ‘‘concern’’ over the future of abstract
paintings. He offers Halpert’s assessment: ‘‘She appears to me to be
convinced that some modicum of design, conscious design is at the
back of all this activity.’’ Williams also mentions that Niese, a young
painter whom he respected, did find value among the Abstract Expres-
sionists: he ‘‘much admires De Kooning but does not imitate him.’’
According to Niese, during his first visit to Rutherford, he talked with
Williams about art—‘‘particularly Kline, de Kooning, and abstract ex-
pressionism. He didn’t quite know what to make of it. I think the ab-
sence of a recognizable image had him buffaloed for a while’’ (1983,
689).
Although playful in closing his letter to Sheeler, Williams appears
to adhere to Halpert’s belief about ‘‘design’’: ‘‘You go on with your
inhuman but never cruel forms . design is at the back of it. Design is
beatific . perhaps angelic.’’ He signs-off, ‘‘Bless you, Bill’’ (1959b,
Sheeler Papers). Despite the humorous tone, his emphasis upon de-
sign in effective painting is reminiscent of his previously cited re-
sponse to Walter Sutton. Consequently his crediting of Pollock’s
‘‘blobs of paint’’ in Paterson V with the principle of design, which he
correlates with the work of close friends like Shahn and Sheeler, sug-
gests Williams’s ultimate belief in the ‘‘real’’ power of Pollock’s art-
istry.
Williams’s reference to Niese in this letter is also important. Wil-
liams had written about Niese two years earlier in a broadsheet for an
exhibition catalogue of his work at the ‘‘G’’ Gallery in New York City
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(Dijkstra 1969, 266). Williams found Niese’s work quite impressive.

He even wrote the poem ‘‘Jersey Lyric’’ in response to Niese’s litho-
graph Jersey Composition (Mariani 1981, 759). He wrote to Denise Lev-
ertov, ‘‘Saw some paintings of a young New Jersey painter who lives
about 40 miles from us in country district about Lake Hopatcong that
are quite marvellous today; thrilling work, actual records of life but
NOT abstracted for a patterned to appeal to a geometric unity’’ (1998,
41). In his essay, he touts Niese as seeking a ‘‘new way of life as well
as a new way of painting it’’ (1978, 231). This brief commentary on
Niese also offers one of Williams’s strongest, most direct critiques of
abstraction: ‘‘I have noticed, in seeing the previews at the movies, that
they are far more exciting than the finished pictures. That is because
we see them graphically, unburdened by the banal story. Abstract
painting has missed the point, we are not so much interested in those
cerebral exercises, as in freeing the real from its boring implications:
we want to recognize our lives but not the tiresome scenes and fellows
which and whom we know all too well’’ (231). Williams equates ab-
straction with a failed mental exercise—it has offered freedom from
the real but a freedom into what? The next year when Paterson V ap-
pears, though, Williams is not only correlating Pollock’s ‘‘blobs of
paint’’ with ‘‘design,’’ but he also correlates the notion of the ‘‘real’’
with abstraction: ‘‘pure from the tube. Nothing else / is real’’ (1992,
211). In consideration of the Niese piece, therefore, Williams’s Pater-
son V suggests a change in thinking about Pollock’s artistic ability to
ultimately free ‘‘the real from its boring implications.’’
Like O’Hara’s lunch hour walk in ‘‘A Step Away from Them,’’
which commemorates Pollock’s death, Williams follows the lines in
Paterson V about Pollock’s ‘‘blobs of paint’’ with an emphasis on being
a part of the world:
WALK in the world

(you can’t see anything
from a car window, still less
from a plane, or from the moon!? Come
off of it.)
(1992, 211)
Significantly both poets’ Pollock references correlate the activity of

walking with the immediacy of being a part of the thing you create.
Both O’Hara and Williams also emphasize ‘‘seeing.’’ These connec-
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tions further parallel the process of action painting, which Pollock

made famous. O’Hara describes it this way: ‘‘Only the artist who has
reached this state [of clarity] should be indicated by Harold Rosen-
berg’s well-known designation Action Painter, for only when he is in
this state is the artist’s ‘action’ significant purely and simply of itself.
Works of this nature are new in the history of Western civilization’’
(1975, 26). The ideas of clarity, newness, and the notion of ‘‘unim-
peded force and unveiled honesty’’ speaks not only to Pollock’s work,
but to O’Hara’s and Williams’s poetry as well. The imagination bursts
forth in the final book of Paterson—renewed and reinvigorated. As old
and decrepit as the poet has become, the creative process enables him
to transcend the finiteness of his situation.
A final intriguing association between Williams, O’Hara, and Pol-
lock concerns their mastery of the line. For Williams and O’Hara,
their control over shorter lines and strategic line breaks are unparal-
leled. Pollock was no different in his own medium. As O’Hara re-
marks, Pollock had ‘‘an amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning
it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the
line—to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrass-
ment of riches in the mass by drawing alone’’ (1975, 32). The lines in
Paterson Book V illustrate what Williams learns, in part, from artists
like Pollock. As Mariani asserts, ‘‘Williams was using a sharp, jagged
tercet or—less frequently—a quatrain without benefit of any punctua-
tion beyond an initial capital. What he achieved with this form was a
sense of speed where line breaks kept cutting against syntax. The re-
sult was a fine tension between the ‘meaning’ of a line and the pres-
ence of the line as a formal entity with as much solidity as pigment
squeezed out onto a canvas’’ (1981, 726). Clearly Mariani’s description
of Williams’s technique echoes Pollock’s own. He, in fact, describes
Williams’s ‘‘The Desert Music’’ as a type of Pollock ‘‘action painting’’
with its concern over ‘‘process’’ and the ‘‘need to locate the moment
of life-sustaining inspiration’’ (1981, 635).
To see the poet’s work described in this way heightens Pollock’s
subtle influence upon Williams at this time. In his statement to Book
V, which was originally conceived as four books, he says, ‘‘I have come
to understand not only that many changes have occurred to me and
the world, but I have been forced to recognize that there can be no
end to such a story I have envisioned’’ (1992, xv). In a similar way,
Pollock’s late paintings reflect a struggle to create what Williams calls
‘‘imaginative validity.’’ As noted earlier, Frank argues that Pollock did
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not ‘‘repeat himself.’’ Despite the well-documented turbulence of his

final years, he managed to create praiseworthy works like The Deep
(1953) and (Scent) (1953–55). Take The Deep for example. Leonhard
Emmerling asserts that Pollock’s placement of colors ‘‘runs counter to
his earlier practice of setting the entire picture plane in rhythmical
vibration’’ (2003, 82). Pollock uses white to almost entirely cover the
canvas and swallow a central darkness; in fact, several white lines cross
this gap and appear to be initiating the process of absolute coverage.
Lest one take away something too uplifting about the whiteness bridg-
ing this blackness, it may help to recall Melville’s ‘‘The Whiteness of
the Whale’’ in Moby Dick, a work seemingly evoked by Pollock’s title.
There Melville conveys the complexity of white’s meaning and the
nothingness that it holds for the meditative Ishmael. Like the forlorn
wanderer Ishmael, The Deep reflects an artist continuing to explore the
depths of his medium. The innate inventiveness of Pollock’s imagina-
tion incessantly struggled to push beyond repetition and traditional
limitations. Williams could understand that desire even late in life.
Paterson V after all opens with the speaker consumed by old age, di-
minishing creativity, and death: ‘‘death is a hole / in which we are all
buried’’ (1992, 210–11). In part, Pollock’s artistry offered Williams a
key for escape.
O’Hara, for one, enthusiastically praised Pollock’s much-maligned
late works. He describes Blue Poles (1952) as ‘‘one of the great master-
pieces of Western art’’ (1975, 37) and The Deep (1953) as ‘‘a scornful,
technical masterpiece’’ (38). According to curator Waldo Rasmussen,
O’Hara challenged ‘‘the prevailing view that Pollock’s gift had dried
out and convinced that for all their undeniable unevenness the late
works were pointing in new directions’’ (Gooch 1993, 295). Estab-
lished art critics, most notably Clement Greenberg, scoffed at
O’Hara’s adulatory and poetic art critiques. Yet O’Hara unabashedly
praised Pollock. ‘‘This is the affirmation of an artist,’’ O’Hara writes,
‘‘who was totally conscious of risk, defeat, and triumph. He lived the
first, defied the second, and achieved the last’’ (1975, 39).
Like Williams, O’Hara found inspiration in Pollock’s artistry. The
poem ‘‘Ode on Causality,’’ originally entitled ‘‘Ode at the Grave of
Jackson Pollock,’’ offers a poignant expression of this inspiration.15 In
neo-Romantic fashion, O’Hara’s poem expresses praise for the painter
through a child’s voice. A little girl runs away from Pollock’s bronze
grave marker indicating to the speaker that the painter is not in the
ground, but among the surrounding trees. The speaker then prays for
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‘‘strength and vitality’’ to enhance his artistic technique (Perloff 1998,

214):
. . . make me be distant and imaginative

make my lines thin as ice, then swell like pythons
the color of Aurora when she first brought fire to the Arctic in a sled
a sexual bliss inscribe upon the page of whatever energy I burn for art
(1995, 302)
The poet finds in the painter a guiding force for his own creative ef-
forts. He desires both the imaginative vibrancy and subtle control in-
herent in Pollock’s work. Like Williams, he connects the notion of
artistic imagination to Pollock’s renowned technique and talent.
By aligning these three artists, we are witness to a unique expression
of artistic synergy in postwar America. The Evergreen Review offers a
concrete expression of this relationship. However, its importance
stretches beyond one issue of this literary magazine. To better ap-
preciate the link between Williams and O’Hara’s poetry, it’s essential
to examine their connection to Pollock. They both respond, in partic-
ular, to the painter’s creative design, unflagging experimentation, and
desire to represent, in all of its honesty and vitality, what Williams
describes in Paterson V as the ‘‘hole / in the bottom of the bag’’ (1992,
210).
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4
‘‘A Blossoming of the Spirit’’:
Williams, Emanuel Romano, and the
Authenticity of Artistic Expression
THROUGHOUT THE LATE 1940S AND EARLY 1950S, WILLIAM CARLOS

Williams was close to the center of the New York School of painters.1
Yet this geographic proximity did not result in a great deal of interac-
tion with this younger generation of artists. As previously discussed,
Williams briefly corresponded with Robert Motherwell and notably
references him in ‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’ (1951). He never met
Jackson Pollock. However, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, he
does reference the famed Action Painter in several writings, most
memorably in Paterson, Book V. He never, at least in my reading, refer-
ences the works of important artists like Franz Kline or David Smith.
At this time when American artists were emerging as central figures
in the avant-garde, Williams was instead developing a close personal
relationship with a New York painter, the Italian born Emanuel Ro-
mano, son of famed Jewish sculptor Henryk (Enrico) Glicenstein.
Such a friendship once again shows that creative individuals like Wil-
liams follow their unique instincts and curiosities, not the predictable
paths convenient to scholars. The relationship started with Romano
painting Williams’s portrait, yet it also resulted in Williams writing
‘‘The Portrait’’ (1951) and ‘‘The Broken Vase’’ (1957). Besides their
commentary on Romano’s artistry, these essays and his interaction
with the painter reveal Williams’s continuing interest in artistic exper-
imentation and also his uncertainty about its meaning and direction
within the contemporary art scene.
Now, this chapter will focus almost exclusively on the Williams and
Romano relationship. O’Hara, from my research to date, seems to
have been unaware of Romano’s work. Part of his silence, no doubt,
stems from the timeframe of his arrival in New York. O’Hara did not
98
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4: ‘‘A BLOSSOMING OF THE SPIRIT’’ 99
start living in the city until August of 1951 (Gooch 1993, 189). By that
time, though, much of the public attention for Romano’s work had
dissipated. Only two notices for a Romano exhibition appear in the
New York Times during O’Hara’s time in the city—both for his exhibi-
tion at the Passedoit Gallery in December, 1951.2 Early in this same
month, O’Hara, who was inspired to be around a Matisse retrospec-
tive, started working at the Museum of Modern Art as a sales clerk
(Gooch 1993, 207). No doubt the Matisse exhibition and new job
overshadowed O’Hara’s possible notice of any Romano showing.3 The
museum also never acquired any of Romano’s paintings. Besides these
personal disconnects, O’Hara appeared drawn to abstract art rather
than the more figurative work that Romano produced during this pe-
riod.
Some past critical explorations of Williams’s Romano essays have
viewed them amid a broader art study. For instance, Henry Sayre
briefly references ‘‘The Broken Vase’’ in The Visual Text of William
Carlos Williams for what the essay says about Pollock and Abstract Ex-
pressionism. In William Carlos Williams and the Maternal Muse, Kerry
Driscoll suggests that they enable Williams to ruminate on the nature
of portrait painting and the idea of autobiography that goes into cre-
ative expression. She convincingly argues that Williams does this for
‘‘two strategic reasons’’ (1987, 16). The first is that such an approach
enables him to offer a more ‘‘honest’’ assessment of Romano’s work
‘‘without exaggerating its importance.’’ The other reason, according
to Driscoll, concerns his mother’s proclivity for portrait painting and
his then recent discovery of three medals that she earned at L’Ecole
des Arts Industrielle. Such a reading offers a sound foundation for my
own exploration of the essays, particularly for examining Williams’s
broader thoughts about art. For my purposes, though, a closer look
at the biographical, specifically Williams and Romano’s friendship, is
essential for clarifying his views of Romano’s art, as well as his
thoughts about contemporary artistic trends.
Emanuel Romano’s Background
To begin a discussion of Romano, it is necessary to discuss briefly

his artistic heritage. Romano’s father was a well-respected sculptor of
Polish origins who studied, according to historian Łucja Pawlicka
Nowak, at the Munich Academy and eventually won the Prix de Rome
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for his works Arion and After Work It Is Good to Rest. At the 1900 World
Exhibition in Paris, his Cain and Abel earned a silver medal. According
to an extended obituary in the New York Times, Glicenstein was ‘‘said
to be the only sculptor to have exhibited jointly with Auguste Rodin’’
(1943, 23). He created busts of several famous figures, including
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pope Pius XI, and Benito Mussolini. Re-
garding Mussolini, Glicenstein recalled in an interview that the infa-
mous dictator disliked cold steel. During the measuring of his head
with compasses, Mussolini stood up and shouted, ‘‘Corpo di Bacco!’’
Ultimately a conflict with Mussolini triggered Glicenstein’s departure
for the United States in 1927 (Zigal 1985, 75).
When in Rome in 1897, Glicenstein’s son Emanuel Romano Gli-
censtein was born. According to Charlotte Snyder Sholod, an Italian
clerk suggested ‘‘Romano’’ as a name that would offer the child a sym-
bolic connection to his birthplace (2001, 15), and upon his emergence
as an artist, Romano used this middle name as a way of earning acclaim
on his own merits rather than exploiting his father’s reputation. Dur-
ing his lifetime, Romano did garner artistic recognition and exhibited
at several notable museums, including the Whitney Museum. Doro-
thy Adlow, art critic for the Christian Science Monitor, described him in
the early 1930s as seeing ‘‘the relationship between the expressionists
and primitivists and abstract painters of today with the imagery of the
past’’ (‘‘Emanuel Romano, Painter’’ 1).4 His paintings of working peo-
ple predate, according to Adlow, ‘‘the vogue for ‘social’ subject-mat-
ter’’ (2). She saw such works not as ‘‘documentary,’’ but evidence that
Romano ‘‘discerns the universal in the particular’’ (2). Besides his sub-
sequent portrait of Williams, Romano also created portraits of Ten-
nessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and André Gide. He did
illustrations for woodcuts of T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘The Wasteland’’ and Beck-
ett’s ‘‘Waiting for Godot.’’ And according to his 1984 New York Times
obituary, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Boston Museum
of Fine Arts included his work in their collections.
Another Romano work of note was a mural entitled The Circus dis-
played in the auditorium of the Klondike Building on Welfare Island.
The building has since been demolished and Welfare Island has been
renamed Roosevelt Island;5 however, Romano’s mural offers an illu-
minating point of contact with Jackson Pollock. Romano painted The
Circus as part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. As part of its Federal
Art Project, Photographic Division Collection, 1935–42, the Smith-
sonian Institution has a photo of Romano working on the mural in
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1936. Romano, with brush in hand and painter’s smock, sits at the base
of his mural applying touches to the talons of a parrot leaning over a
fallen clown. The New York Times reported the dedication of this
mural covering 500 square feet when it was first unveiled in September
1937 at the City Home for the aged and infirm.6 Jackson Pollock, too,
worked in the mural division of the Federal Art project, entering in
August 1935, but he eventually moved into the easel division in 1936
(Frank 1983, 23). There is no record of Romano making such a switch.
B. H. Friedman’s biography of Pollock is helpful here. He offers a suc-
cinct overview of the differences between these two divisions. For the
most part, Realistic painters sought work in the mural division while
artists more inclined toward abstraction looked towards easel painting.
The easel division, according to Friedman, allowed these artists ‘‘more
freedom as to size and subject matter as well as to working hours and
conditions’’ (1995, 35).7 Considering the stark stylistic contrasts in
both painters, their choices at this time reflect their differing ideas
about the direction of contemporary American painting.
This stylistic difference obviously bears itself out in their later work.
However, 1951 offers an intriguing convergence of their painterly in-
terests. As previously noted, Romano was an accomplished portrait
painter and in 1951, he sought Williams out to paint his portrait. This
same year marked another shift in Pollock’s work. Throughout this
period, he worked on a series of more figurative poured paintings pri-
marily using the color black. His achievement in these paintings has
been disputed. Frank O’Hara, for one, finds merit in the series: ‘‘Giv-
ing up all that he had conquered in the previous period, Pollock re-
confronted himself with the crisis of figuration and achieved
remarkable things’’ (35). Art historian Leonhard Emmerling describes
it as a step backward ‘‘to formal inventions already tested in works like
Gothic’’ (2003, 81). Elizabeth Frank admits that this work is ‘‘difficult,
problematic, and at times aesthetically unsuccessful’’ (1983, 87). How-
ever, she convincingly argues that the merit in these paintings should
be understood amid Pollock’s ‘‘dialectical’’ development, his alterna-
tion between abstraction and figuration.8 With this return to more
figurative painting, Ellen Landau points out that 1951 started a period
when Pollock became more preoccupied with portraiture—‘‘an exam-
ination of the run of the series shows that the human head was his
most persistent image’’ (217). These paintings, though, could never
be confused with Romano’s portraits. For instance, Portrait of William
Carlos Williams (1951) situates the poet in an armchair resting his hand
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upon his cheek. Despite a facial angularity somewhat evocative of Pi-

casso’s mask-like Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905–6), Romano’s paint-
ing conveys a distinct reflection of the actual poet. Conversely
Pollock’s Number 27, 1951, although containing a recognizable face in
the lower right-hand corner, which Landau identifies as Lee Krasner
(1989, 217), resists such realistic figuration. To the left of the distinct
face and above it, Pollock’s lines offer greater abstraction and figural
ambiguity. In further contrast to Romano, Pollock continued his
pouring technique, even using a turkey baster (Landau 1989, 214). He
also experimented with pouring paint directly from the tube, as Frank
has noted in Number 28, 1951 (1983, 97).
More Than a Sitting
The sitting for Romano’s painting of Williams took place in Ruth-

erford from late September through October 1951. Concerning the
sitting, Mike Weaver recognized the different perspectives each man
brought to this moment of artistic contact. Romano brought, as
Weaver keenly explains, ‘‘an undivided consciousness of the force of
both ancient and modern traditions in art. Williams in this last phase
of his life was in the process of lifting himself out of his own locality
and crossing the Hudson . . . into a consciousness of world art’’ (1966,
20). Weaver’s assessment of these converging lines offers a key for un-
derstanding the influence these meetings had upon Williams’s
thoughts about art during this final decade of his productivity.
The sittings held their share of frustrations for both men. For in-
stance, as Paul Mariani records, Williams ‘‘began to grow restless’’
about his inactivity (1981, 641). Romano, too, described some diffi-
culty painting Williams: ‘‘The only thing disturbing me was the re-
flection of the light in his eye-glasses. Something maddening—the
light was so strong I could not see Williams’ face’’ (Zigal 1985, 77).
Despite these difficulties, Mariani points out that something beneficial
did start to occur for the poet: ‘‘as Romano watched Williams, Wil-
liams was also watching Romano. And what fascinated Williams was
the artistic process revealing itself five feet away from him, in this art-
ist totally absorbed in realizing an elusive presence’’ (1981, 642). As
Williams opens ‘‘The Portrait,’’ he describes the process that has been
involved: ‘‘I have seen the picture grow in the mind of Emanuel Ro-
mano who is painting it. I have seen him struggle to realize what he
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wanted to put down to depict my face’’ (1978, 196). The nature of

such a struggle has a productive result: ‘‘Together the artist and the
sitter combine . . . to produce this miraculous image.’’ By standing
apart and observing this process, Williams gained a clearer perspective
of the artist and a greater understanding of the creative process, and it
led him to a valuable insight about the painter. ‘‘If Romano was no
great artist,’’ Mariani suggests, ‘‘he was nevertheless a real one, con-
sumed with the need to make a statement on canvas as Williams had
been equally consumed to make one on paper’’ (1981, 642).
Based upon his diary entries, Romano clearly took a personal liking
to Williams. In the previously mentioned diary entry, he describes
Williams as having a ‘‘sensitive, but not very sharp, face,’’ which he
contrasts with Pound and Eliot. Romano found himself drawn to this
sensitivity and sought as an artist to ‘‘bring out the almost saintly sim-
plicity of the man’’ (Zigal 1985, 77). In an October 12 entry, he de-
scribes a visit from McDowell, Williams, and Andy Morgan. Romano
showed the men his work and Williams responded excitedly. Accord-
ing to Romano, ‘‘Williams was the only one who responded with
childlike joy to my works. . . .—‘more, more, show me more!’ ’’ (Ro-
mano Papers).9 Four days later, Romano again wrote of Williams.
This time he was visiting Williams to work on another of the portraits.
‘‘W. was waiting for me,’’ he writes. ‘‘He is one of the few men I
love—in such a short time we have come to understand each other so
perfectly. He has an open mind and clarity of thought.’’ Two days later
Romano went with Williams and Flossie to the theater to watch ‘‘The
River,’’ a film directed by Jean Renoir. At dinner that night, Williams
informed Romano that he had finished his essay. He told the painter,
‘‘ ‘if you don’t like it, I shall write another one!’ His wife agreed!’’
Later that evening, as they walked down 5th Avenue, they saw a win-
dow display of Williams’s work at Scribner’s Bookstore. Romano en-
thusiastically captured Williams and Flossie’s response: ‘‘theirs was
such a childlike joy—so natural a reaction! modesty is really a rare
thing today.’’ These anecdotes capture what Romano appreciated in
Williams—his generosity and enthusiasm, as well as his authenticity
and open-mindedness.
In the essay mentioned by Romano, ‘‘The Portrait,’’ Williams
places the younger man amid the larger trends that were occurring in
the arts. As part of the opening, Williams describes how in the past
seventy-five years in painting as a ‘‘means of seeing and placing colors
and shapes upon the canvas have been enormously expanded (, mainly
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by the French school). Every avenue open to human ingenuity has

been explored. (Today there is no school that one need follow. There
is no longer any closed circuit to painting. Today, knowing the re-
sources, anyone can do anything . . .)’’ (1978, 197). For Williams, the
modern effort to break from tradition opened a field of possibilities
for innovative imaginative expressions. Besides providing such possi-
bilities, though, this effort also challenged a younger generation of
artists whether a painter like Romano or Pollock—‘‘There it is. Now
see what you can do with it’’ (1978, 197).
Romano’s portraits are Williams’s specific point for discussion. He
asserts that ‘‘of all paintings the portrait is the most complex . . . and
the most satisfying’’ (197). What becomes particularly crucial about
this essay, given the backdrop of its composition, is the way that Wil-
liams situates Romano. As mentioned earlier, Williams wrote it while
also preparing his address ‘‘The American Spirit in Art.’’ Now, that
address functions as a defense of the abstractionists’ experimental ef-
forts. However, at times in that talk, Williams offers qualified praise.
Perhaps this is most evident toward his conclusion when he suggests
the following: ‘‘May we not here improvise to say, of abstract painting,
that there is one further step awaiting it before its extinction: when it
is being done by the blind’’ (1978, 219). In his essay on Romano, he
again offers a cutting assessment of these abstractionists. While ex-
plaining the nature of portrait painting, he asserts, ‘‘Modern painters
have been baffled by it. They have been afraid of the horrible word
‘representational’; they have run screaming into the abstract, forget-
ting that all painting is representational, even the most abstract, the
most subjective, the most distorted’’ (1978, 197). Williams’s descrip-
tion, conjuring up an image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, suggests
an extreme response to the modern artist’s challenge.
‘‘The Act of Scribbling’’
Soon after this depiction, Williams describes the subjective phase of

painting in mocking terms: ‘‘Influenced by Freud they discovered the
subconscious and represented it on their canvases. The scribblings of
children five years old were discovered to be ‘revealing.’ But the time
must come when such a lode is exhausted. Such a time has now ar-
rived’’ (1978, 198). Now, it is important to point out that Williams
was not opposed to the practice of ‘‘scribbling.’’ For instance, he re-
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peatedly uses the term in the ‘‘Foreword’’ of The Autobiography. In

these few pages, he equates ‘‘thinking’’ with ‘‘scribbling’’: ‘‘It has al-
ways been during the act of scribbling that I have gotten most of my
satisfactions’’ (1951a).10 He then describes how he would visit Alfred
Stieglitz, attend the Marsden Hartley show, or go to see the Unicorn
Tapestries at The Cloisters: ‘‘After that, I’d come home and think—
that is to say, to scribble. I’d scribble for days, sometimes, after such a
visit, . . . trying to discover how my mind had readjusted itself to its
contacts.’’ Later, he describes visits to Kenneth Burke’s house in An-
dover: ‘‘Reactivated, I’d go home to the eternally rewarding game of
scribbling.’’11 In attempting to explain his need to write amid his daily
responsibilities as a physician, he remarks, ‘‘I couldn’t rest until I had
freed my mind from the obsessions which had been tormenting me all
day. Cleansed of that torment, having scribbled, I could rest.’’12
Clearly, as is evident by his use of this term in the ‘‘Foreword,’’ Wil-
liams found value in this creative process.
Williams’s Freudian reference, though, suggests his continuing un-
certainty about Abstract Expressionism, a movement that he sees
rooted in French Surrealism. As Dickran Tashjian explains, ‘‘he was
skeptical if not unsympathetic toward the usefulness of Freudian the-
ory for the arts’’ (1996, 10). To understand his ‘‘scribbling’’ comment,
it also seems worthwhile to recall ‘‘The American Spirit in Art,’’ which
offers the abstractionist Robert Motherwell ‘‘a hearty welcome’’
(1978, 219). As Mary Ann Caws discusses in Robert Motherwell: What
Art Holds, Motherwell practiced ‘‘sublime scribble’’ or what he called
‘‘doodling’’ (1996, 27). Along with Roberto Matta’s influence, Caws
notes that Motherwell’s ideas about this automatic method were
shaped by Anton Ehrenzweig. Using in part Ehrenzweig’s words, she
writes, ‘‘the task of the artist is to ‘disintegrate the articulate and ratio-
nal surface perception and to call up secondary processes in the pub-
lic,’ calling on the secret life of the emotions, those techniques of
scribbling that have their direct outcome in emotional power’’ (30).
Through this method of scribbling, the artist therefore releases un-
conscious thoughts with the desire to produce an imaginative expres-
sion.
Now O’Hara, like Williams, experimented with automatic writing,
as evident in the poem Second Avenue, a long poem written in the stu-
dio of Larry Rivers (1995, 529). Close friend John Ashbery describes
reading it as ‘‘a difficult pleasure’’ (1995, ix). ‘‘You see how it makes it
seem very jumbled,’’ O’Hara explains, ‘‘while actually everything in it
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either happened to me or I felt happening (saw, imagined) on Second

Avenue’’ (1983, 39–40). Despite the difficulty of constructing a read-
ing for this poem, the painter Grace Hartigan asserts, ‘‘It has every-
thing art should have. It has imagery, emotional content, leaps of
imagination, displacements of time and place going back and forth,
flashings of modern life and inner feelings. Name it, name anything,
and it’s got it’’ (Perloff 1998, 70). Brad Gooch also has aligned it with
painting; he has described it as ‘‘the culmination of his accelerating
desire to use a kind of automatic writing to match the epic scale and
grandeur built up by accident and subconscious connections in Ab-
stract Expressionist painting, aleatory music, and French Surrealist
catalogue poems’’ (1993, 233).
The poem itself moves back and forth with references to all sorts of
people and things: Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, Marilyn Monroe, and
a de Kooning WOMAN. Like Williams’s Kora in Hell, O’Hara felt the
need to try to interpret but not explicate the passages. ‘‘I now feel my
attitude was toward the material,’’ he writes, ‘‘not explanatory of the
meaning which I don’t think can be paraphrased (or at least I hope it
can’t)’’ (1983, 37). It is difficult to understand O’Hara’s poem. There
is a steady flow of varied references, ideas, images, and voices. There
is no real linear progression (unless one counts the chronologically
numbered sections). It is difficult to argue with Perloff or Vendler that
there is ‘‘too little design.’’ Yet Perloff has noted that it is ‘‘a real stylis-
tic advance’’ (1998, 73). In part, she points out O’Hara’s reference to
friends by name, his ‘‘sense of presence,’’ and his catalogs of ‘‘everyday
things in his life.’’ Like Williams, this experimentation with improvi-
satory writing facilitated his continuing poetic development.
For Williams, measure is eventually needed in writing to progress
beyond total subjectivity and an absence of objective reality. In The
Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America,
Daniel Belgrad offers a compelling argument about how the ‘‘aesthet-
ics of spontaneity’’ provided a poet like Williams, who fashioned him-
self a ‘‘cultural outsider,’’ with ‘‘access to cultural authority’’ (1998,
40). He asserts that for Williams (as well as Charles Olson) ‘‘it seemed
imperative to integrate the free play of the unconscious with an empir-
ical ‘reality principle’ in order to arrive at truth’’ (37). He, in fact, cites
a 1944 Motherwell commentary: ‘‘All my works [consist] of a dialectic
between the conscious (straight lines, designed shapes, weighed color,
abstract language) and the unconscious (soft lines, obscured shapes,
automatism) resolved into a synthesis.’’ Williams, too, shares that de-
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sire for balance between free play and artistic control to create that
truth, that authenticity of artistic creation. Without such a balance,
the method itself becomes reductive and aesthetically empty. For him,
therefore, scribbling is an important act, just as this abstractionist
phase is important in the progression of the art history, but it cannot
be the end in itself. Such a belief, in Williams’s eyes, borders on absur-
dity. Given the context of this term in his ‘‘Foreword,’’ as well as his
reference to ‘‘cerebral exercises’’ in his essay on Henry Niese, Wil-
liams’s mockery of the abstractionists in ‘‘The Portrait’’ becomes
clearer. For him, scribbling is an important act, just as abstraction is
important in the progression of the arts, but its time has now passed.
In short, the sustained practice of abstraction must ultimately give way
to something ‘‘new.’’
Surprisingly Pollock seemed to share such a belief, suggested in part
by his production of more figurative paintings in 1951. Elizabeth
Frank contends, ‘‘Pollock’s sensing a need for aesthetic change
emerges as the most salient of the motives for the black paintings’’
(1983, 88–89). In the context of reading Williams’s ‘‘The Portrait,’’
rather than interpreting these painting as some sort of regression or
retreat, they can be seen as a continuing effort to explore the possibili-
ties of both his medium and technique. The fact that this figuration
included the increasing depiction of human forms and heads suggests
further parallels to Williams’s assertions about the nature of portrait
painting. For him, portrait painting presented artists with the ‘‘great-
est challenge,’’ as well as the promise of a ‘‘new field into which the
next phase of the art will extend. The portrait is the new field’’ (1978,
197). Despite his seeming distance from the younger generation of
avant-garde artists, he perceptively understood the crossroads con-
temporary artists like Pollock faced: ‘‘Painters are asking themselves,’’
Williams writes, ‘‘Shall I return to realism—the public at least would
be happier? There is nothing else left for me—I’m sick of my own
guts’’ (198). Pollock would never return to such realism, but his series
of black paintings from this period reflect his own effort to answer
Williams’s question.
Authenticity and ‘‘The Spirit’’
Considering the fact that ‘‘The Portrait’’ is about Romano, one

might expect that Williams would herald the Italian as the artist to
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show us the way into this new phase of art. Yet in looking at his essay
in its totality, which includes the several draft variations included by
Bram Dijkstra in A Recognizable Image, Williams avoids asserting such
a bold thesis. Rather he goes out of his way to explain that this is not
what this essay is about. For example, at the start of section 5 he writes,
‘‘I do not intend to make any categorical statements regarding my
friend Emanuel Romano’s worth as a painter. I know him only as an
inheritor of the immediate past. I have seen no more than perhaps a
hundred of his paintings. He is struggling to express something, some-
thing which I am trying to identify’’ (1978, 202). Williams himself
struggles to articulate what Romano is actually expressing. As the sec-
tion concludes, he tries yet again to express what he sees and does not
see in Romano’s work: ‘‘Here is a blossoming of the spirit. I refuse to
try to evaluate its achievements. I am not capable of it. I insist only on
the authentic identity of the dedication. I believe in that—and where
have I acquired it but from the paintings themselves? They are full of
honesty, they are often moving, they are always painted with a paint-
er’s eye for the materials—a light of deep feeling grows out of them’’
(204–5). Such comments, ultimately deleted from the Passedoit Gal-
lery catalog (December 3–22, 1951) and the Gotham Book Mart Gal-
lery publication (1968), reflect Williams’s perception of ‘‘the spirit’’ in
Romano’s work. He acknowledges an ‘‘authentic’’ artistic intent, as
well as an ‘‘honest’’ painterly expression. Those words are crucial in
the Williams lexicon. However, Williams refuses to offer a final ver-
dict about their ultimate artistic value. This same type of ambiguity
parallels his defense of Abstract Expressionists (at least as evident in
‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’).
Not surprisingly, Romano was disappointed with Williams’s initial
draft of the essay. In an undated entry in his diary, he claims, ‘‘The
man is not sure about painting, and about me. He turns around and
around, afraid to commit himself—I would have been happy if he had
said that he hated my painting, that he could not stand it, that he
found it / me ?? obnoxious etc., etc. . . . . At least it would have been
something of a standing—but this is stand-offish situation. I don’t
know whether McD. will be able to use it’’ (Romano Papers). Romano
clearly perceives Williams’s uncertainty. In fact, Williams’s full essay
reads as polite yet qualified praise. He truly enjoyed Romano’s work,
but with clear limitations. He certainly did not esteem him in the way
that he did the earlier modern masters like Cézanne. Yet in Romano’s
reaction to Williams’s draft, the painter touches upon the bigger ques-
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tion for Williams at the time—what is one to make of contemporary

art, particularly Abstract Expressionism? As previously discussed,
throughout the 1950s, Williams maintains this uncertain and often-
times skeptical attitude toward artists as different as Romano and Pol-
lock, yet he also refuses to dismiss the value of their work. It reflects
an exceptional capacity on Williams’s part to withhold judgment of
something that leaves him uncertain.
We can see from their correspondence that Romano took an active
role reviewing ‘‘The Portrait’’ and suggesting changes. In a letter
dated November 7, 1951, Williams explains, ‘‘I have gone over the
statements about Chirico. Much of it cut, at your request. But what I
have left I want to stay, it is part of the total argument’’ (1951c, Wil-
liams Collection, Delaware).13 Despite his initial disappointment, Ro-
mano eventually did appreciate the final draft. In a letter simply dated
Thursday, he wrote thanking Williams: ‘‘The last chapters of the
‘essay’ are like a poem—a poem of an artist for an artist—a brother in
spirit, in ideals, in aims. I shall translate it in Italian for the catalog
of my forthcoming exhibition in Milan’’ (Williams Papers). Williams
responded favorably to Romano’s suggestion in a letter dated Novem-
ber 16, 1951: ‘‘it will be interesting to hear what the boys over there
think of it. Maybe we can learn something from them. There are never
enough chances to learn’’ (1951d, Williams Collection, Delaware).
Such a remark is noteworthy. Despite some of his strong rhetoric re-
garding the cultivation of an American idiom and an American poetry,
Williams sought to learn from all sources—he never squandered such
opportunities. As Dijkstra points out, many are ‘‘misled into believing
that he was an American chauvinist in matters of art. The contrary was
clearly the case’’ (1978, 9). ‘‘[I]t was not the nationality of the artist,’’
Dijkstra argues, ‘‘but the force of the image he had created which
counted for him’’ (10).
The most intense period of Williams and Romano’s relationship
occurred in 1951 as Williams was preparing his essay on contempo-
rary art for the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Based again
upon Romano’s diaries, we can identify some threads from that ad-
dress that emerged in conversations between the two men. For in-
stance, in a diary entry for November 28, 1951, Romano writes about
a dinner with Bill and Flossie. In this conversation, he recalls Williams
referencing ‘‘Toynbee’s idea of the equality . . . of the first settlers in
these shores. For there was space and real freedom’’ (Romano Papers).
As previously mentioned, Williams cited Tonybee’s ideas in order to
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persuade his audience to tolerate the new. Their dinner conversation

also touched upon the notion of the American spirit, as Romano re-
cords ‘‘lighted buildings seen from the plains of New Jersey’’ embod-
ied ‘‘perhaps the spirit of America.’’
Romano’s exhibition at the Passedoit Gallery occurred from De-
cember 3 through 22; Williams’s address to the National Institute of
Arts and Letters occurred on December 18. Soon after his address
Williams corresponded with Romano (January 11, 1952). While there
was no mention of his talk, Williams does contrast Romano’s work
with the prevailing mode of painting. Specifically he references Ro-
mano’s reproduction of his father’s work: ‘‘To me it is all feeling, mak-
ing the materials speak. That is the outstanding thing. It is not the
mood of today which is concerned more with the materials than the
human, the directly human approach.’’ In such a comment, Williams
significantly touts the humanistic element in Glicenstein and Ro-
mano’s work. Later in the letter, he discusses Romano’s early self-por-
trait, presumably Self-Portrait, 1934 (Nice, France). This realistic style
painting portrays the intense fixed gaze of the painter staring directly
at the spectator with neither a sense of despondency or elation—just
unflinching resoluteness. ‘‘I somehow call to kind that self portrait you
made as a young man,’’ Williams writes, ‘‘the one I told you resembled
the work of Clouet. It is less turbulent than your later work, more con-
trolled, cooler in color. I must confess that something in me more ad-
mires that stillness. Perhaps it is a fault—or old age.’’ That notion of
stillness is interesting to consider, especially because it seems antithet-
ical to what Williams admires about the poetry of the era. His com-
ment about age also seems indicative of his understanding that he may
be behind the curve on what younger artists are thinking and doing in
art.
A Trip to Rutherford
There is roughly a six-year period between Williams’s two Romano

essays. Throughout this time, however, Romano and Williams were
in periodic contact. One of the most telling encounters occurs on June
9, 1952. Romano records in his diary a phone call when Williams an-
swered in a ‘‘broken voice,’’ ‘‘I am not well—I want to die—I don’t
want to see anybody’’ (Romano Papers). Romano felt at a loss to help.
A few hours after hanging up the phone, Williams called back. He was
crying and apologized ‘‘for being sissy, for being weak.’’ Romano im-
................. 17540$ $CH4 12-08-09 13:40:06 PS
PAGE 110
mediately decided to leave New York and travel to Rutherford. When

he got there, he described Williams as ‘‘gaunt, more bent’’ with the
look of an ‘‘obsessed man.’’ The two men embraced and eventually
Williams asked him upstairs. He ‘‘sank’’ into his chair, according to
Romano, and said that ‘‘he wanted to cry to relieve himself of a load
in his chest—But he could not he felt closed up.’’ To break-up the
silence, Romano started talking. He then observed the following: ‘‘he
took his head in his hands, and covered his face with his long fingers. I
saw only his strong nose sticking out. He reminded me of Van Gogh’s
painting, ‘At the Threshold of Eternity.’ Then he got up and went
down into his back yard. The flower beds were full of roses, which
were bloom, the rosebushes were all around the fences—red of a deep
velvety red, pink of a tender shade we sat on chairs, and the wet grass
and flowers and the trees all around us were a wonderful setting—I
told Williams to enjoy what he had created. He felt like a sinner, he
wanted to clean himself up’’ (Romano Papers). Beneath this entry, Ro-
Untitled Sketch of William Carlos Williams by Emanuel Romano, journal entry

dated June 9, 1952. Emanuel Glicen Romano Papers, 1922–1967. Archives of
American Art. Smithsonian Institution. Permission to print granted by Julie
Dreyfuss Tatum.
................. 17540$ $CH4 12-08-09 13:40:29 PS
PAGE 111
mano includes a rough sketch of a man (presumably Williams) much

in the spirit of Van Gogh’s painting. Although it is unfair to compare
Romano’s journal sketch with a finished work like Van Gogh’s paint-
ing, it is clear that both painters capture the broken spirit of their sub-
jects. The angularity of Romano’s sketch—both in terms of head
profile and body—evokes the sharpness of Williams’s pain and despair
at this time. Rather than having the seated man leaning forward, head
in hands as in Van Gogh’s painting, Romano’s figure sits on the floor
with his head back, eyes closed, knees up, and hands stretched out.
Although both bodies almost fold in on themselves, the open hands in
Romano’s sketch suggest a figure open and desirous of some form of
relief outside himself. He appears exhausted, but not defeated. The
incident and image recorded by Romano reveal a highly vulnerable
moment in Williams’s life; however, it also reveals the degree of inti-
macy shared between these men. Clearly Romano was not just another
devotee looking for something from the established poet. Later in
July, he received a call from Williams thanking him for a package—
‘‘Again he felt good,’’ Romano writes, ‘‘and moved—A poet is back!’’
(Romano Papers).
‘‘The Broken Vase’’
Williams’s second Romano essay, entitled ‘‘The Broken Vase,’’ ap-

peared after Romano’s return to America in 1956. He had left in 1953
for an extended stay in Safad, Israel, to open and direct the Glicenstein
Museum, named in honor of his revered father.14 Upon his return, Ro-
mano wrote congratulating Williams on his poetry prize award:
‘‘Enjoy your creation, and with it, your life’’ (Williams Papers).15 In
his December 1956 letter, he also describes the pleasure of reading
Williams’s poetry while in the south of France: ‘‘Your words sound
rich and meaningful and deep—alive and pregnant—under that south-
ern firmament!’’
In this essay, Williams again attempts to situate the painter amid the
art trends of the time. He opens with the following assertion: ‘‘The
fragments of passion are to be valued as much as passion itself’’ (1978,
206). For Williams, the fragmentation found in the works of the Sur-
realists and Modernist painters have gained global acceptance to
‘‘everyone in Europe, America, and South America.’’ He distinguishes
this work, however, from the more recent work of ‘‘the Ultramod-
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erns,’’ a group that he claims could ‘‘bring on a paroxysm of schizo-

phrenia—the Sigmund Freud disease—calling to mind the disturbed
face of a Pollock or a Michaux or an Artaud’’ (206). He uses the popu-
lar and controversial Pollock as the American artist representative of
this fragmentary expression of modernity. Yet his reference to Mi-
chaux and Artaud suggests a belief that this trend crosses cultural
boundaries. For Williams, ‘‘such work[s] are not a whole. They are a
[part] of an impossible whole, a fragment, which has surpassed the art-
ist’s conception.’’ It is the artist’s effort to reformulate ‘‘in the face
of a universal schizophrenia’’ what Williams describes as a ‘‘fractured
personality.’’
Eventually Williams narrows his focus to Romano’s work. He ar-
gues that Romano is not ‘‘the first’’ to do what he does. ‘‘[B]ut,’’ as he
asserts, ‘‘the twist he gave to the imagination has a very direct and
simple and convincing appeal to it’’ (1978 207). He discusses how Ro-
mano’s experience in Paris following the war informed his art. ‘‘And
suddenly he was conscious of a vase,’’ Williams writes, ‘‘the tragic
Paris of his youth, broken into a thousand pieces’’ (207). The broken
vase image informs his interpretation of Romano’s work, particularly
his sense of its fragmentation. He references canvases that contain ‘‘an
effigy of a fish,’’ an upright homunculus, as well as a homunculus lying
on his side. Yet the focal point of his essay is the image of the vase on
canvas—‘‘always with the philosophic pyramids at the back, [it] con-
sists of various fragments of the same vase, or the derivatives (some-
times difficult to recognize), always a foursquare arrangement simply
arranged’’ (208). The background pyramids, for Williams, ‘‘completes
the composition, giving the philosophic thought of the whole its valid-
ity—yet it retains its pictorial validity’’ (208). In closing, Williams re-
turns to his opening notion of passion. He describes Romano as a man
‘‘whom passion has worn, a silent man who has no voice but the paint
which he sobs alone.’’
Without the opportunity to view Romano’s paintings directly, there
is some difficulty assessing his work from this period. From my review
of microfilmed images, though, Romano clearly trends toward greater
abstraction during the 1950s, as evident in paintings like Abstract
Forms, 1951 or Abstraction, 1956. Yet, even in these paintings, there is
a deliberateness of design that rejects the projection of spontaneity.
The transformation in style also may be evident in his two self-por-
traits. As previously noted, Self-Portrait, 1934 (Nice, France) reflects
Romano in a Realist tradition. Self-Portrait, 1956, included in Mike
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Weaver’s 1966 article, reflects a less realistic and more surreal depic-
tion of the artist. Rather than a close-up focus on the speaker’s head,
Romano frames a faceless full body in a semi-reclined pose. The figure
holds a mask resembling the facial expression of the earlier self-por-
trait against his thigh. ‘‘With Self-Portrait,’’ Mike Weaver writes, ‘‘the
modern conception of the portrait describes itself in relation to Ro-
mano’s other works. As the map is to the landscape, so the painter’s
detached mask is to himself’’ (1966, 21). The stylistic transformation
in self-portraits reflects Romano’s own continuing artistic develop-
ment. It certainly does not possess the dramatic intensity or avant-
garde nature of Pollock’s achievement; however, it does reflect an art-
ist continuing to explore various modes of expression on his canvas.
Romano, as evident in his later Self-Portrait, never rejects figurative
art. He certainly would not be confused with the more prominent
New York School artists. This distinction becomes more explicitly
stated in his later exhibitions. Alfred Werner, a contributing editor for
Arts Magazine, attempted to mark this difference in his statement for
the Sigmund Rothschild Gallery exhibition of Romano’s work (Sep-
tember 29–October 23, 1961). He writes, ‘‘At a time when many non-
thinkers mistake anarchy for freedom, and regard discipline as a hin-
drance rather than as the self-willed firmness of conviction it actually
Self-Portrait (1956), oil and collage, 20 X 30 by Emanuel Romano. Permission to
print granted by Julie Dreyfuss Tatum.
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is, ROMANO, ignoring the flux of isms and fashions, keeps on paint-
ing with the deep-rooted faith of a Cézanne or a Piero della France-
sca.’’ Werner’s references to non-thinkers, anarchy, and ‘‘isms’’ seem
a direct attack on a movement inspired by Pollock’s all-over style. To
further emphasize this contrast, Werner describes Romano as an artist
who, unlike these other artists, projects more than just feeling. He
‘‘thinks as well as feels,’’ Werner argues, and painting functions for
him as a means ‘‘to transmit an emotional and intellectual message’’
that ultimately ‘‘encompasses in classically firm, yet expressionistically
simplified . . . scaffolds of design.’’ He lauds Romano’s realism, his
ability for ‘‘reproducing recognizable shapes and colors.’’
Romano himself reveals through his correspondence a steadfast de-
votion to figurative art. In an August 28, 1957, letter from a beach on
Montauk Long Island, he describes to Williams his desire to create
‘‘new pictures’’ inspired by the sea. While aspiring to convey the sea
in all its totality—‘‘its moving motion . . . its ominous sound’’—he
envisions ‘‘putting figures on its foreground’’ who stand some distance
from one another and suggest ‘‘the inherent loneliness of men’’
(1957b Williams Papers). At the bottom of the letter, he includes a
preliminary sketch of these figures. Later, he paints Communion of the
Isolated, 1960, a poignant portrayal of those men he saw loosely gath-
ered together on a beach during that memorable sunset.
From Romano’s viewpoint, Williams’s essay on his later work
missed the mark. In a letter dated April 1957, a spirited Romano tells
Williams about his eagerness to read the essay, stopping at a corner in
Rutherford after leaving the poet’s home. He writes, ‘‘I must confess
to you that my expectations were shattered.’’ He then goes on to ex-
plain, ‘‘I did not find enough relationship between your written word
and my painted picture. It seems to me that your essay is a little too
generalized and touches too fleetingly my own work’’ (1957a, Wil-
liams Collection, Delaware). Although it is unclear at this point ex-
actly what paintings Williams viewed, Romano’s critique does have
validity. Too often in the essay Williams deals with generalities and
makes broad artistic associations. Later in his letter, Romano rebukes
Williams for failing to ‘‘see’’ his paintings. Furthermore, he charges
Williams with imposing himself on the work: ‘‘You look at my pictures
and seek an explanation and you may find your own. You have discov-
ered the ‘schizophrenic’ one.’’ Mike Weaver, who corresponded with
Romano and gained familiarity with his oeuvre, offers the following
assessment of Williams’s shortcoming: ‘‘It did not occur to him that
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one could draw ruins and remain intact oneself, the American concept
of demolition not allowing ruins except as archaeology. This is not
the feeling Romano’s Resurrection conveys. Nor are Romano’s Forms
broken to represent our fractured personalities. On the contrary, their
organisation within the painting implies the wholeness of the painter’’
(1966, 21). In an effort to explain himself to Williams, Romano draws
upon the importance of the modern locale in shaping his art, clearly a
point that Williams would understand and share. He powerfully asks,
But what have I seen?—I and men of our own generation who had the
good or bad luck to have been born in Europe? Wars, upheavals, revolu-
tions, depressions, hunger, cruelty, death and destruction. The glorious
victories, lasting a short season, were crowned by disasters. Men had be-
come mere shadows of themselves. Beautiful, richness of culture and noble
Humanism trampled by so called Supermen—tyrants—the world had not
seen their equals before. What have I to paint if not the mirror of these
defeats—or should I shut myself in my own garden and paint flowers? Sing
not the Ninth symphony but a dirge over our shattered dreams. . . . So
there my men, my vases lie on the bare, desolate earth—helplessly! (1957a
Williams Collection, Delaware)
Clearly, for Romano, Williams failed to contextualize his artistry. In

fact, Romano’s point corresponds to Williams’s ideas about represent-
ing an actual locale rather than focusing on ‘‘things’’ more aestheti-
cally pleasing.
The painter’s words evidently affected Williams. He subsequently
wrote back to Romano on June 25, 1957, and acknowledged his short-
comings: ‘‘Your words, eloquent and true, applied not only to painting
but to the situation of all ort [art] in the modern age. I regret that my
own statement about your paintings did not satisfy you. I confess that
I was looking at a technical aspect as it appealed to a non painter inter-
ested in painting instead of you yourself and the pictures you had
brought out to show me’’ (1957a, Williams Collection, Delaware). Be-
sides the ‘‘confession,’’ though, Williams suggests that both men
‘‘were talking of the same thing’’; it is just that he failed to articulate
it adequately in relation to Romano’s work. He concludes by saying,
‘‘If I was stupid in speaking of the pictures you had shown me it was
not because of lack of appreciation of what you had, which I always
admire and sometimes even love, but from my own inadequacy.’’ In
the end, Romano chose not to use Williams’s essay.
Williams’s reply admits his shortcomings as a commentator of Ro-
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mano’s work. His two Romano essays suggest that he felt comfortable
enough with Romano’s art to want to write about it. In contrast to
the other artists out there who left him somewhat confused, Romano
appeared to be an artist Williams understood. Romano’s strong reac-
tion to ‘‘The Broken Vase,’’ however, called that into question. Con-
sidering his somewhat ambiguous commentary concerning other
visual artists of the 1950s, particularly those of the New York School,
one wonders whether it shook his confidence about publicly com-
menting on this contemporary art scene—after all, if he was off about
a more conventional painter like Romano, one that he felt he under-
stood, then what would that mean about his criticism of others like
Pollock or Motherwell? Notably Williams never wrote a sustained
essay about another younger contemporary artist throughout the re-
mainder of his life. Instead, he continued moving toward the work of
older artists like Pieter Brueghel—artists that he clearly respected and
understood.
Yvon Bizardel, honorary director of the Museums and Libraries of
Paris, praised Romano’s work because it ‘‘departs from the formal
rules and strict geometry of the ancient masters. . . . [H]e is a man of
today [who has] escaped the rigid constraints of the past to freely enjoy
his materials; either to liberate the line or make it bend to his will’’
(qtd. in Zigal 1985, 83). Rightly, I think, Thomas Zigal links these
words to Williams’s poetry. Perhaps, Williams understood that con-
nection. The two certainly came together through the imaginative
process of creating the portraits. In section 2 of ‘‘The Portrait,’’ Wil-
liams himself notes how the ‘‘oldest field of all’’ is open to the artist—
‘‘the imagination’’ (199). For Williams, the preference for technique
had overshadowed the imagination. In portrait painting, as he points
out, it is ‘‘the imagination working subtly with the flesh , representing
extraordinary cominglings between two images: the painter and the
sitter. It is a world of unrealized proportions’’ (200). Through their
correspondence, Romano’s diary, and Williams’s essays, it becomes
clear that both men gained more from their initial collaboration than
they expected. They came together artistically, imaginatively, and per-
sonally. And although Williams refrained from a clear estimation of
Romano’s actual accomplishment, much as he did the more prominent
Abstract Expressionists Pollock and Motherwell, at the very least he
saw Romano as an artist of ‘‘today,’’ an artist who offered in his paint-
ings a dedication to the authentic expression of the imagination.
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5
Efficiency in Form: Artistry and Authenticity in
the Works of Williams, O’Hara, and Smith
IN HIS INTRODUCTORY ESSAY TO DAVID SMITH: A CENTENNIAL, CARMEN

Giménez cites Michael Brenson’s claim that Smith ‘‘ ‘Almost single-
handedly . . . changed the nature of sculpture in America’’ (2006, 3).
Giménez then adds, ‘‘He did so because he embodied, as no one else
did, the new American artistic spirit.’’ Without invoking Williams or
his controversial 1951 address, Giménez’s comment crystallizes an-
other important link between the poet and New York School artists.
Considering the visual artists discussed so far, Smith appears to be the
most distant from the life and writings of Williams. As discussed ear-
lier, Williams corresponded with Motherwell, notably referenced Pol-
lock, and befriended Romano. From my research to date, he never
mentioned Smith. For his own part, Smith never directly referenced
Williams in his writings. Both men do share some general associa-
tions—most notably the painter Stuart Davis and the sculptor Con-
stantin Brancusi. The only concrete connection between the two,
though, is Frank O’Hara’s reference to Smith’s enjoyment of Wil-
liams’s poetry. Despite such limited concrete connections, Smith
seems closely aligned with Williams’s ideas about art, the United
States, and the creative process. Such an alignment gains greater clar-
ity through Frank O’Hara’s appreciation and promotion of each man’s
work.
Like Williams, Smith chose to work away from New York City. He
spent some of his most productive years close to Lake George at Bol-
ton’s Landing, New York. Williams would no doubt appreciate the
rise of this American sculptor. Born in 1906 in Decatur, Indiana, from
what he often described as pioneer stock, Smith’s father worked for an
independent phone company; however, Smith remembered him as an
inventor. In fact, according to Smith, inventors populated the whole
town, most evident in the assortment of homemade automobiles: ‘‘In-
118
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5: EFFICIENCY IN FORM 119
vention was the fertile thing then’’ (Wilkin 1984, 11).1 This early im-
mersion in mechanical inventiveness no doubt fostered Smith’s later
imaginative explorations.
The Artist as Workman
Smith’s early working life further shaped his artistry. In 1925, he

worked the summer at a Studebaker factory in South Bend. ‘‘The as-
sembly line had not yet been introduced and each worker was expected
to perform a wide variety of tasks,’’ notes Stanley E. Marcus, ‘‘includ-
ing riveting, drilling, lathe work, milling, and spot welding’’ (1983,
23). At various points, Smith spent time at Ohio University, Notre
Dame, and George Washington University, but he never completed
his degree. He mostly sought to enroll in art classes at these institu-
tions; however, he did take poetry for a semester at George Washing-
ton. As he once remarked, ‘‘Always been interested in poetry’’ (Smith
1968, 24). It turns out that academia did not suit Smith. In 1926, he
moved to New York and subsequently started attending the Art Stu-
dents’ League. As the practice of welding became more difficult and
dangerous to accomplish in his Brooklyn Heights apartment, Dorothy
Dehner, his then wife and fellow artist, suggested the Terminal Iron
Works on the Brooklyn waterfront. Smith described his initial meet-
ing with the proprietors this way: ‘‘ ‘I’m an artist, I have a welding out-
fit. I’d like to work here.’ ‘Hell! Yes—move in.’ . . . I learned a lot from
those guys and from the machinist that worked for them named Rob-
ert Henry. . . . Those guys were fine down there—never made fun of
my work—took it as a matter of course’’ (1968, 25.) It is at this ferry
terminal that Smith refined his technique. According to Marcus,
‘‘Smith did not finally learn to weld with the oxyacetylene torch . . .
until his association with the workers at the Terminal Iron Works’’
(1983, 23). When Smith eventually moved to Bolton Landing in 1942,
he named his new studio the Terminal Iron Works. He did this, as he
says, because his ‘‘particular type of sculpture required a factory more
than an ‘Atelier’ ’’ (1968, 31). Unbeknownst to Smith, his workman-
like approach to art fulfilled Williams’s own conception of the modern
artist. In The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams remarked that an art-
ist ‘‘is to be a kind of laborer—a workman—a maker in a very plain
sense—nothing vague or transcendental about it: that is the artist—at
base’’ (1974, 23).
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Smith’s production methods at Bolton Landing are legendary. Pho-

tos of him at work by Dan Budnik or Ugo Mulas suggest less the artist
at work and more a modern American workingman appareled in
boots, jeans, and a cap. ‘‘By choice,’’ he stated, ‘‘I identify myself with
working men and still belong to Local 2054 United Steelworkers of
America. I belong by craft—yet my subject of aesthetics introduces a
breach. I suppose that is because I believe in a working man’s society
in the future and in that society I hope to find a place’’ (Smith 1968,
61). Like Williams and O’Hara, the idea of work for Smith comple-
mented the creative process and production of art.
Despite this common man exterior, Smith’s sculptures were any-
thing but common. The critic Hilton Kramer notes the uniqueness of
Smith’s locale and artistry. ‘‘Smith’s workshop in the mountains . . .
brings together two old fashioned ideas of American life: the proud
individualism and keen workmanship of the man who lives on his own
land. Both are ideals of freedom out of the American past’’ (Gray
1968, 15). Kramer’s notion of these American roots offers a critical
conduit to Williams’s own artistic choices. Without any specific refer-
ences by Williams to Smith or vice-versa, some shared associations be-
tween these men need examination to illuminate their aesthetic
connections. Most prominent among these relations appear to be the
work of Stuart Davis, the artistry of Constantin Brancusi, and the art
criticism and poetry of Frank O’Hara.
Points of Contact: Davis, Brancusi, and O’Hara
Of the three, Stuart Davis was the only one of these men who had a
personal relationship with both Smith and Williams. Williams sought
Davis’s drawing Gloucester Terraces (1916) for the frontispiece of Kora
in Hell. He believed it represented what he was trying to do in his Im-
provisations: ‘‘It was, graphically, exactly what I was trying to do in
words, put the Improvisations down as a unit on the page. You must
remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. . . .
Anyhow, Floss and I went to Gloucester and got permission from Stu-
art Davis to use his art—an impressionistic view of the simultaneous’’
(1958a, 29). This early contact, one might even say collaboration,
identified Williams’s literary experimentation with a visual equivalent.
It also garnered respect for Williams from Davis, an important Ameri-
can precursor to the New York School artists. ‘‘I see in it a fluidity as
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opposed to stagnation of presentation,’’ Davis remarked to Williams

after receiving a copy of the book, ‘‘It opens a field of possibilities’’
(Hills 1996, 62). Davis’s mention of ‘‘a field of possibilities’’ takes on
greater significance when placed in relation to two men who con-
sciously thought about ideas of creativity in the context of literal and
metaphoric fields—most noticeably in Williams’s description of the
poem as a field of action and Smith’s placement of sculptures in the
fields surrounding his home at Bolton Landing.
For a younger generation of American artists, Davis proved to be an
important mentor and source of encouragement (Smith 1968, 27). In
the ‘‘windy openness’’ of the 1930s, Smith described the New York art
scene as one where artists sought the ‘‘new’’ but lacked a sense of their
own ‘‘identities’’ (35). Smith added, though, that this was not true for
an artist like Davis whom he described as ‘‘a solid citizen for a group
of [us].’’ The two even belonged to a short-lived group, including de
Kooning and Gorky, known as the ‘‘abstractionists.’’
Davis’s early involvement with Williams, according to art historian
Patricia Hills, reinforced Davis’s experimental ‘‘resolve’’ (1996, 57). It
also foreshadowed the later encouragement Davis would offer Smith
for artistic experimentation. Smith credits conversations with estab-
lished artists like Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham as vital con-
tributions to the younger artists of this time (de Kooning 1994, 166).
In a somewhat poetic response entitled ‘‘The Question—what are
your influences—,’’ Smith even singles out conversations with Davis
at pubs like McSorleys for his development as an artist (1968, 146).
Clearly, from Smith’s perspective, Davis influenced his early ideas
about art and about the business that always seems to threaten its in-
tegrity.
Besides Davis, another compelling association shared by Williams
and Smith is the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Smith held Brancusi’s
work in high regard (Tucker 2006, 71). Paul Hayes Tucker has identi-
fied several Smith sculptures influenced by the Romanian sculptor.
Most noted among these are the head portion of Agricola I (1951–52),
the top of Tanktotem IX (1960), and the base of Sentinel (1961) (2006,
82, 89). Williams also thought highly of Brancusi. In fact, in 1924 on
his trip abroad with Flossie, he met Brancusi whom he described as ‘‘a
short compact peasant of a man, with his long gray hair, like a sheep
dog’’ (188). On a subsequent visit, he enjoyed a beefsteak dinner with
the shepherd-like Brancusi. While there, they ‘‘talked, surrounded by
his creations in wood and stone, like the sheep, one might say, crop-
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ping out of the chaos of unorganized masses (later to be worked upon),

the rocks and trees of a shepherd’s world in the flickering half-light
about us’’ (196).
Many years later in 1955, Arts (formerly Art Digest) commissioned
Williams to write a review of the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition
of Brancusi’s work. It is what Paul Mariani describes as ‘‘one of the
strongest pieces of art criticism he wrote during the entire decade’’
(1981, 690). Williams’s article praises the body of work currently on
display in New York City (inclusive of works shown at the Museum of
Modern Art). ‘‘It is not to be described as abstract art,’’ Williams
writes, ‘‘the figures are presented without distortion, in a natural rela-
tionship of their anatomic parts reduced to the essentials’’ (1978, 247).
This essentiality in Brancusi’s work garnered Williams’s attention. He
notes it in The New Born, as well as Fish (polished, green mottled mar-
ble). Bram Dijkstra argues that Brancusi’s essentiality actually in-
formed the poet’s verse: ‘‘Williams had first learned how to eliminate
the inessential in his work, more than forty years earlier’’ (1978, 42).
For this study, though, the most important and vital presence link-
ing Williams to Smith is Frank O’Hara. Through his responsibilities
at MoMA, O’Hara held a congenial professional and ultimately a close
personal friendship with Smith. Smith’s death in an automobile acci-
dent in 1965 greatly saddened O’Hara. Erje Ayden, a Turkish writer,
recalled spending an evening with O’Hara when a discussion abruptly
shifted to David Smith: ‘‘And when Frank cried at the death of David
Smith, self-consciously letting his tears drop into the cognac, I did
much the same thing. That was the first and last time that I saw Frank
unable to walk from too much liquor’’ (1988, 172). As an associate cu-
rator of the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara put together a Smith
retrospective. In his introduction to this retrospective, O’Hara com-
pared the sculptor’s accidental death with Pollock’s: ‘‘A great and vital
force, who like Pollock had given inspiration and esthetic confidence
to many other artists, was suddenly gratuitously removed from Ameri-
can art’’ (1975, 53). Besides this introduction, O’Hara also wrote a
1961 article for Art News entitled ‘‘David Smith: The Color of Steel.’’
O’Hara based his article on a visit he took to Smith’s workshop/studio
in Bolton Landing. Later, in 1964, he also conducted an interview of
Smith for the television series Art New York: The Continuity of Vision.
O’Hara wrote the poem ‘‘Mozart Chemisier’’ shortly after his 1961
visit to Bolton Landing. According to O’Hara, ‘‘the Mozart comes in
because he was his favorite composer’’ (Collected Poems 1995, 552). Be-
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sides a passion for classical music—he tuned into the New York classi-
cal radio station WQXR while working—Smith loved gourmet food
and fine wine. Early in O’Hara’s catalog introduction to Smith’s retro-
spective exhibition, he offers contrasting portraits of the sculptor in
and out of the city:
At a part or a vernissage in New York he appeared a great, hulking, plain-

spoken art worker out of Whitman or Dreiser, neither impressed nor par-
ticularly amused by metropolitan ‘‘light weight’’ manners, somewhat of a
bull in a china shop; at his home in Bolton Landing, with the same ‘‘plain’’
manner, he prepared delicious meals himself, offered excellent wines and
cigars, and spoke of his love of Renaissance music (particularly Giovanni
Gabrieli) and Mozart and the writings of James Joyce, of his interest in the
musical ideas of John Cage, in the dancing and choreography of Merce
Cunningham, in the poetry of Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Wil-
liams, in the worker of younger artists . . . . On walks he might discuss
Egyptian and Sumerian art (his ‘‘Zig’’ series was inspired by the latter and,
I believe, also the ‘‘Cubi’’ series), local politics (he had run for public office
in Bolton Landing, but not been elected), the cult of Marilyn Monroe
(with which he was in complete and enthusiastic sympathy), what you
yourself had been working on recently and the difficulties involved. (1975,
55)
Clearly O’Hara’s sketch reveals Smith as a renaissance man. Such an

eclectic background caused his close friend Robert Motherwell to say,
‘‘Oh David you are as delicate as Vivaldi, and as strong as a Mack
truck.’’ (Gray 1968, 8). Motherwell’s oft quoted description captures
the strength and elegance of this man and his art.
Of particular note, though, is O’Hara’s reference to the sculptor’s
interest in Williams’s poetry. I have yet to come across Smith refer-
encing Williams in his writings. It also remains unclear to what extent
Smith read Williams’s verse.2 One must, therefore, depend upon
O’Hara’s description of Smith’s interest. The fact that O’Hara even
mentions Williams among the other names suggests Smith’s high re-
gard for a poet often associated with the American avant-garde.
To develop O’Hara’s view of Smith more fully, it may help to first
turn to the aforementioned ‘‘Mozart Chemisier.’’ In the poem,
O’Hara presents a speaker struggling to find some degree of satisfac-
tion amid his natural setting. The poem begins with this speaker
mocking his companion’s feelings of connectedness: ‘‘For instance you
walk in and faint / you are being one with Africa’’ (1995, 428). The
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speaker has a different experience. He describes seeing a ‘‘foaming’’

soda with ‘‘a head on it,’’ and his consumption of a ‘‘double carbon-
ated bourbon.’’ These bubbling images suggest his increasing frustra-
tion. Alcohol may offer a substitute for what he desires here:
in the moonlight the poplars look like aspidistra

over the unexperienced lake
wait, wait a while it all kept murmuring
but I know that always makes me so sad
there was a lot of tinselly sky out which irritated me too
From these lines, he clearly can see assorted parts of nature; however,
he fails to experience any wholeness or achieve any Emersonian glad-
ness from it. He lacks patience and remains antagonistic to this natural
world and frustrated and annoyed by its sights and sounds. He subse-
quently states, ‘‘my anger is strictly European,’’ perhaps suggestive of
a desire to impose his will upon this locale—the ‘‘plan plan’’—rather
than accepting it for what it is and simply experiencing it. The bub-
bling image returns in later lines and somehow links the speaker with
what seems a polluted natural scene: ‘‘suds in the lake, suds in my
heart.’’ He remains antagonistic to the temptations he perceives mani-
fested in ‘‘the lake the tree’’—‘‘I didn’t have any white toreador
pants.’’ With the promise of ‘‘bubbly gin,’’ he then heads down the
trail to the ranch.
At one telling point in the poem, the speaker redirects his address
from his companion to the world:
oh world why are you so easy to figure out

beneath the ground there is something beautiful
I’ve had enough of sky
it’s so obvious
everyone thinks they’re going up
in these here America
(428)
The speaker’s dismissive comment masks a failure to connect, not only

to the surrounding natural world but also to his companion. He asserts
a preference for the physical, ‘‘the ground,’’ rather than the mystical,
‘‘the sky.’’ This preference separates him from the majority of those
who seek something beyond this place.
The key to the speaker’s anger and flippancy seems to be in the re-
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mark quoted earlier: ‘‘that always makes me sad.’’ His isolation in na-
ture leads him to contemplate who and what he is—yet he does not
seem comfortable with that type of reflection. An artist like Smith who
lives and works in such a lonely place, must not only negotiate that
sadness and solitude, but he must learn how to work within it to create
great art. The poem concludes, ‘‘I don’t care how small the house they
live in is / you don’t have any earrings / I don’t have a ticket.’’ The
repetition of ‘‘don’t’’ in these final three lines points to the lack of con-
trol the speaker and his companion have here. For better or worse,
they appear stuck in this place—both literally and figuratively.
Smith’s Fields
O’Hara’s visit to Smith’s home also resulted in an article for Art

News entitled ‘‘David Smith: The Color of Steel’’ (1961). Famously
Smith displayed his sculptures around the fields surrounding his
home. O’Hara memorably describes them as ‘‘people who are await-
ing admittance to a formal reception and, while they wait, are thinking
about their roles when they join the rest of the guests already in the
meadow’’ (1983, 121). The presence of these sculptures in the field
offers an intriguing way of understanding Smith’s oeuvre as an artist,
particularly in light of what has been discussed already in regard to
Williams’s ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Action.’’ Some, like Patricia Jo-
hanson, an environmental artist, have described the presence of these
sculptures in the fields as a work of art itself: ‘‘It was like the whole
fields of David Smith was the work of art. It wasn’t one sculpture. It
was that work in relation to the landscape that was so powerful, so
important’’ (Brenson 2006, 39).
Smith began placing his sculptures in the fields as a necessity be-
cause he was running out of places to put them. Their placement here,
however, stimulated him. ‘‘Putting pieces together,’’ recalled photog-
rapher Dan Budnik, ‘‘he suddenly saw their relation to one another,
like pieces in the shop. He got flipped out of his mind excited’’ (Bren-
son 2006, 45). Smith’s excitement engendered his desire to keep the
sculptures together within his fields. As Michael Brenson explains, this
desire made Smith’s fields an imaginative and active place for the cre-
ation of sculpture. For Smith, they functioned as Brenson claims, as
‘‘storage space, showroom, laboratory, project, poem, and dream. In
them, his sculptures performed for him, guided him, pushed him, and
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supported him. There, he could dissolve boundaries, release his ex-

traordinary energy, and meet the demands of his equally extraordinary
ambition’’ (46). Brenson’s description itself dissolves the boundaries
that may limit a true grasp of the fields’ importance for Smith beyond
just being ample ground.
In essence, the fields functioned as a medium for Smith. He worked
the fields, not cultivating a staple crop, but creating a greater under-
standing of the sculptures that he was making. Patricia Johanson
speaks about the active nature of this process: ‘‘He used to sit there
and look at it and move them around. He so clearly was working in
relation to that piece of land’’ (Brenson 2006, 50). There is almost
something Emersonian in Smith’s placement of his welded sculptures
in the surrounding natural landscape. In ‘‘The Poet,’’ Emerson de-
scribes his ideal poet as one ‘‘who re-attaches things to nature and the
Whole,—re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature,
to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most dis-
agreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the rail-
way, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these;
for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the
poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the beehive,
or the spider’s geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her
vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own’’ (2001,
189). Williams accomplishes what Emerson calls for in a poem like
Paterson—he literally draws upon the Great Falls and the city of Pater-
son, Hamilton’s idealized factory village, to forge his own unique long
poem. Reading Emerson’s lines, though, also reveal the power of
Smith’s artistic accomplishment. His sculptures, rooted in the materi-
als and techniques of American industry, seem to emerge from the
very fields they inhabit.
The Cubis, a series of twenty-eight sculptures created from 1961
through 1965, offer one of the most direct expressions of how the
fields complemented Smith’s artistry. According to Brenson, the Cubis
are ‘‘the clearest declarations of Smith’s desire to make sculpture that
interacted with nature’’ (52). This series of massive stainless steel
sculptures use various geometric shapes in seeming defiance of the
laws of physics. For instance, Cubi XIX, 1964 balances two tipped
boxes, two rectangular blocks, and a pill-like circle on its t-shaped un-
derpinning. Cubi X, 1963, with its ascending squares and projected
rectangular planes, offers a human-like form seemingly in mid-step.
Of course, their gravity defying appearance depends upon the artist’s
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skill. Yet the Cubis are more than the assemblage of these shapes.
Smith’s burnished stainless steel reflects light in such a way as to offer
continual optical transformation. Smith desired such an effect: ‘‘I like
outdoor sculpture and the most practical thing for outdoor sculpture
is stainless steel, and I make them and I polish them in such a way that
on a dull day, they take on the dull blue, or the color of the sky in the
late afternoon sun, the glow, golden like the rays, the colors of nature.
And in a particular sense, I have used atmosphere in a reflective way
on the surfaces’’ (Smith 1968, 123). David Heald’s full color photo of
Cubi XXI, 1964, with its converging shapes, offers a stunning example.
The shimmering Cubi occupies a central place in a tree-lined gap of
the field. Much like the tree branches framing its placement, the top
stainless steel box stretches toward a brilliant sky. In such a gesture,
the man-made object interacts with its natural setting in such a stimu-
lating modern expression.
Candida Smith, David Smith and Jean Freas’s daughter, claims,
‘‘the fields were truly born’’ with the placement of the famed Australia
in the meadow (Brenson 2006, 58). Australia represents an important
transition in Smith’s body of work. As noted by Edward Fry, curator
of a 1969 Guggenheim retrospective, it ‘‘stands as a dividing line be-
tween two phases of his career’’ (58). The sculpture is magnificent and
seemingly courses through the air in mid-flight; its curved steel lines
suggest the swift movement of some unique creature—part bird, part
insect. Pointed rods atop its head and tail project something forceful,
almost menacing in its design. Yet its sleek composition and energetic
expression projects gracefulness as well. It’s easy to understand how
its active presence in the field could open-up for Smith an important
turn in his artistic thinking about what sculpture could be situated and
created in such a landscape.
For O’Hara, this natural backdrop heightened the unique aesthetic
power of Smith’s sculptures. ‘‘Smith’s works in galleries have often
looked rugged and in-the-American-grain,’’ O’Hara writes, ‘‘which
indeed they are in some respects, but at Bolton Landing the sophisti-
cation of vision and means comes to the fore strongly’’ (1983, 121).
Contrary to the speaker in O’Hara’s ‘‘Mozart Chemisier,’’ these
sculptures do not seem intimidated or ‘‘saddened’’ by an immersion in
nature. Rather they project a palpable strength. No wonder at the
close of his article, O’Hara declares, ‘‘The best of the current sculp-
tures didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I
wanted to be one’’ (125).
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Throughout the piece, O’Hara praises Smith’s genius. He portrays

an artist who, like Pollock, never rests in his experimentation: ‘‘Smith
has always been known for his esthetic curiosity and inventiveness, for
rapid and drastic changes in style whenever the new interest seized
him’’ (124). He also touts a ‘‘unification’’ in Smith’s sculptures, which
is achieved as he explains, ‘‘by inviting the eye to travel over the com-
plicated surface exhaustively, rather than inviting it to settle on the
whole first and then explore the details. It is the esthetic of culmina-
tion rather than examination’’ (1983, 123). In a1964 television inter-
view with Smith for Art New York, O’Hara sums up Smith’s sculptures
as ‘‘very attentive to your presence. They have no boring views; circle
them as you may, they are never napping. They present a total atten-
tion and they are telling you that that is the way to be. On guard. In a
sense they are benign, because they offer themselves for your pleasure.
But beneath that kindness is a warning: don’t be bored, don’t be lazy,
don’t be trivial and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention
leads to death’’ (1964, 13).3 Marjorie Perloff takes O’Hara’s point one-
step further in aligning them to O’Hara’s own poetry. She argues that
‘‘the reader’s eye and ear must ‘travel over the complicated surface ex-
haustively,’ participating in the process of discovery and continually
revising his sense of what the poem is ‘saying.’ The observer can no
longer be detached’’ (1998, 24). This active perceptivity results in the
reader/viewer’s participation in the work. Smith achieves this connect-
edness through his sculpture, but it is also what O’Hara and Williams
accomplish through the very best of their lyric poems. If you skim or
trivialize the language or the line, you risk losing the connection and
therefore the possibility for discovery and revelation.
O’Hara’s opening for the Art New York script is as noteworthy as its
closing. He purposefully places Smith in an American literary context:
‘‘In a way David Smith’s career is like ‘The American Tragedy’ in re-
verse. He is the sensitive Dreiser hero who abandons commerce but
becomes thereby world-famous. He is the Thomas Wolfe hero who
stops yearning for the sound of locomotives and proceeds to make his
own versions of them . . . the Henry James hero who dominates and
influences Europe instead of being corrupted by it’’ (O’Hara 1964, 1).4
By making these comparisons and then revising them, O’Hara proj-
ects the sense that what we have with Smith is a sculptor who emerges
from the American grain to forge his own unique artistic identity. He
weathers forces that seem to consume the literary characters refer-
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enced by O’Hara, and he emerges as a powerful creative force—

‘‘Undaunted by our excessively materialistic society Smith has added
to the traditional techniques of sculpture a whole new repertoire of
inventions, combinations and techniques, many of the latter taken
from the methods of heavy industry’’ (1964, 2).5 Instead of the modern
American industrial world beating him down, Smith embraces it and
creates from it. This attitude to modernity seems congruent with
O’Hara who memorably admits in ‘‘Meditations in an Emergency’’ his
preference for modern city living over time spent in the country. Like-
wise it applies to Williams who chose to stay in industrialized northern
New Jersey to work as a physician, but also to draw from this locale in
the creation of his verse. In this way, all three artists embrace Ameri-
can modernity.
Smith and Williams in ‘‘Biotherm’’
O’Hara never references Smith directly in his verse, yet he does al-
lude to Smith’s sculpture in his poem ‘‘Biotherm (For Bill Berkson).’’
Like ‘‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,’’ this occasional poem started in
August 1961 but was not finished until January 23, 1962 (Collected
Poems 1995, 553). The poem appears loosely assembled with numer-
ous inside jokes and obscure references. Perloff, however, describes it
as ‘‘his last great poem and one of the important poems of the sixties’’
(1998, 178). The reference to Smith’s sculptures appears early in the
poem:
. . . extended vibrations
ziggurats ZIG I to IV stars of the Tigris-Euphrates basin
leading ultimates such as kickapoo joyjuice halvah Canton cheese
in thimbles
(1995, 437)
For O’Hara, Smith’s ‘‘Zig’’ series marked the sculptor’s greatest ac-
complishment. In his piece for Art News, he finds particular ‘‘wonder’’
with the Ziggurats with their immensity and design (1983, 124). The
Zigs are a series of three-dimensional painted sculptures that Smith
created during the 1960s. Zig IV, 1961, one of the works O’Hara ref-
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erences, projects force and energy through a series of projectiles ex-

tending out from a slanted square plane; its much smaller wheel base
somehow supports and balances this immense power. The entire work
is covered in a P-70 Pri-Met primer coat (Marcus 1983, 158).
O’Hara’s reference to the ‘‘stars of the Tigris-Euphrates basin’’ in-
vokes the ancient roots of the term, one seemingly rooted in Sir Leo-
nard Woolley’s translation of ziggurat as ‘‘hill of heaven’’ or
‘‘mountain of god’’ (Doczi 1994, 45). These ancient tiered structures
enabled priests to estimate ‘‘the movements of planets, the sun, and
the moon’’ that resulted in ‘‘a lunar calendar for predicting seasonal
changes, floods, sowing and harvesting times’’ (45). O’Hara’s poetic
reference thus associates Smith’s modern works with their more an-
cient namesakes.
Almost a year after Smith’s death, O’Hara arrived in Holland for
a showing of Smith’s works where he ‘‘carefully and melancholically
touched up those Zigs that had been chipped en route’’ (Gooch 1993,
449). He wrote to Vincent Warren that he used ‘‘the very paint he
prepared for such an exigency (sob) and which I brought with me’’
(449). In his introduction to the Smith exhibition, he praises these
sculptures: ‘‘They are among his most unique accomplishments, ma-
jestic in their scale and authority, revelatory in the aspects of plane,
line, and volume, which the colors enforce, outspoken in the original-
ity and virility which they proclaim as prime values in art, yet unpre-
tentious in the simplicity and eagerness of their expression’’ (1975,
64). O’Hara’s adulation here is noteworthy, particularly for the ‘‘lead-
ing’’ notion of their revelatory capacity and artistic originality.
In addition to Smith, O’Hara references Williams in ‘‘Biotherm.’’6
He parodies the closing lines in Paterson Book V when the aged poet
says,
The measure intervenes, to measure is all we know,

a choice among the measures
the measured dance
‘‘unless the scent of a rose
startle us anew’’
(1992, 235)
Here is O’Hara’s revision of the lines in ‘‘Biotherm (For Bill Berk-

son)’’:
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‘‘measure shmeasure know shknew

unless the material rattle us around
pretty rose preserved in biotherm
and yet the y bothers us when we dance
the pussy pout’’
(1995, 439)
Clearly O’Hara pokes fun at Williams’s well-known emphasis on

‘‘measure.’’ Mutlu Konuk Blasing contends that O’Hara’s parody
functions as a rejection of Williams: ‘‘his ‘measure shmeasure’ must be
rejected nonetheless, for measure surfaces the fragile, fluctuating cen-
ter of life, the biological depth of words, by abstracting speech into a
pattern’’ (1990, 313). Yet O’Hara’s play on measure with ‘‘shmeasure,’’
according to Blasing, actually ‘‘affirms his faith in word magic, which
remains the basis of poetry.’’
Unlike Williams, O’Hara did not write extended essays about
poetry. He humorously wrote in ‘‘Personism: A Manifesto,’’ ‘‘I don’t
believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures.
. . . I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on
your nerve’’ (1995, 498). Rather he projects the image of a more spon-
taneous, less predictable poet. As he claims, ‘‘You just go on your
nerve. If somebody’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just
run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star
for Mineola Prep’ ’’ (498). That notion of ‘‘going’’ and ‘‘running,’’ al-
though intentionally comical, speaks to the active impetus behind
O’Hara’s versification, something he clearly valued over an overly
rigid expression of a subject.
What O’Hara does embrace in Williams’s poem is that the rose can
‘‘startle us anew’’ and that the poet must be attentive to such a mo-
ment. This line originally occurs in ‘‘Shadows,’’ a poem that appeared
in Williams’s Journey to Love. In its original context, the rose refer-
ences attentiveness to the moment:
The instant
trivial as it is
is all we have
unless—unless
things the imagination feeds upon,
the scent of the rose,
startle us anew.
(1988, 310)
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Attentiveness to the moment prepares one for those ‘‘things’’ that may
energize the imagination and create not only a fresh experience, but
also a fresh expression of the experience. For O’Hara, this rose be-
comes ‘‘preserved in biotherm,’’ in essence his own form for preserv-
ing what can ‘‘startle us anew.’’ This remains the only reference to the
poem’s title. In a letter dated September 20, 1961, to Donald Allen he
defines ‘‘biotherm’’ as ‘‘a marvelous sunburn preparation full of attar
of roses, lanolin and plankton ($12 the tube) which Bill’s mother for-
tunately left around and it hurts terribly when gotten into one’s eyes.
Plankton it says on it is practically the most health-giving substance
ever rubbed into one’s skin’’ (1961a Allen Collection). In Perloff’s
reading, this ‘‘magic potion’’ is ‘‘interchangeable with ‘kickapoo joyju-
ice halvah Canton cheese / in thimbles’’ (1998, 178); it’s the same
combination O’Hara references after his allusion to Smith’s Zigs.
O’Hara included his parody of Williams’s lines in his letter to Don-
ald Allen. His correspondence conveys enthusiasm for his poem, pri-
marily because as he suggests, ‘‘I seem to have been able to keep it
‘open’ and so there are lots of possibilities, air and such’’ (1961a Allen
Collection). O’Hara’s pleasure at the poem’s openness and possibili-
ties parallels what Paterson V, in part, accomplishes—as it reopens a
poem originally intended in four parts. The final line of O’Hara’s revi-
sion perhaps proves the most difficult to interpret—‘‘yet the y bothers
us when we dance / the pussy pout’’ (1995, 439). According to
O’Hara’s letter to Allen, ‘‘pussy pout’’ is ‘‘a slang term for the mons
veneris, discovered through the researches of John Button’’ (1961a
Allen Collection). The credit to his good friend Button aside,
O’Hara’s crude female reference further evokes Williams’s closing
section of Paterson V that describes ‘‘an old woman’’ who must ‘‘wear
a china door-knob / in her vagina to hold her womb up’’ (1992, 234).
Ultimately, in O’Hara’s poem, the ‘‘y’’ behind the dance creates its
friction. It marks a separation from Williams and ultimately a splitting
from him. This notion becomes clearer later on when he writes, ‘‘I am
sitting on top of Mauna Loa seeing thinking feeling / the breeze rus-
tles through the mountain gently trusts me / I am guarding it from
mess and measure’’ (1995, 444). Marjorie Perloff describes these lines
as expressing O’Hara’s effort to guard his poem both ‘‘from total
formlessness on one hand, and from a more traditional rhetorical and
prosodic organization on the other’’ (1998, 178). His use of the word
‘‘measure’’ here echoes his Williams parody. For O’Hara, Williams’s
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emphasis on measure has the potential to disrupt the spontaneous and

fluid nature of the dance that he hopes to create.
Challenging Tradition
Over the past few pages, I have attempted to demonstrate the depth
of O’Hara’s regard for Smith as an American artist. My intention is
not to argue that O’Hara influenced Smith or vice versa. However,
despite their obvious differences in mediums, their shared aesthetic
sensibilities offer us a clearer way of understanding the ways that Wil-
liams’s notions about artistry permeate the later works of America’s
avant-garde poets and artists. To further elaborate, it may help to
identify some basic parallels between Smith and Williams. For in-
stance, in Spring and All Williams sought to break free through the
stultifying grip of literary tradition—what he terms ‘‘the traditionalists
of plagiarism’’ (1986, 185)—to release the original power of the imagi-
nation. He seeks to break free from the type of writing that searches
‘‘about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and
images’’ (207). To locate the imagination’s true power, one must move
beyond static comparisons, dig deep, and tap into the creative poten-
tial inherent in nature. Williams terms it this way—imaginative writ-
ing is ‘‘not ‘like’ anything but transfused with the same forces which
transfuse the earth’’ (207). To create in such a way, as Williams be-
lieves, results in originality—‘‘It is NEW! Let us go forward!’’ (185).
Smith shared Williams’s attitude about the ways tradition could
hinder the artist and diminish innovation and original expression. As
he remarks, ‘‘I have spoken against tradition, but only the tradition of
others who would hold art from moving forward. . . . Tradition comes
wrapped up in word pictures, these are traps which lead laymen into
cliché thinking. This leads to analogy and comparative evaluation and
conclusion (1968, 137). Smith does not dismiss the importance of tra-
dition outright, but he points out how its invocation could be detri-
mental to artists seeking to explore the new. Like Williams’s desire to
break free from ‘‘apt similes,’’ Smith sees the danger of ‘‘cliché think-
ing’’ and analogies that ultimately limit creative expression. As evident
in the aforementioned Zigs, Smith wants to move beyond a static sense
of tradition to express his unique artistic vision.
Furthermore, like Williams, Smith associates such a view of tradi-
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tion with his cultural background. In The Great American Novel, Wil-
liams claims Americans ‘‘will learn what we will’’ without instruction
from Europe or China. He memorably describes America as ‘‘a mass
of pulp, a jelly, a sensitive plate ready to take whatever print you want
to put on it—We have no art, no manners, no intellect—we have
nothing’’ (1970, 175). Smith appears to share such a sentiment in the
following self-description: ‘‘I know what the challenge is, and I chal-
lenge everything and everybody. And I think that is what every artist
has to do. The minute you show a work, you challenge every other
artist. And you have to work very hard, especially here. We don’t have
the introduction that European artists have. We’re challenging the
world . . . I’m going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die,
challenging what’s given to me’’ (1968, 172). Smith’s words express his
strength and self-assurance as a sculptor. His repetition of the word
‘‘challenge’’ underscores the avant-garde nature of his artistry. Yet this
statement also reveals Smith’s perception of an American background
that shaped his challenging stance. His directness about this cultural
influence separates Smith from some of the Abstract Expressionists.
Pollock talked about creating art in America; however, he never spoke
out as directly about the way this background informed his art.
As suggested from their views on tradition, both men refused to cre-
ate work that merely copied what previously existed in their world.
Returning to Spring and All, Williams came to understand the flawed
nature of merely mirroring modernity. He contends that Shake-
speare’s ‘‘aphorism about holding the mirror up to nature has done
more harm in stabilizing the copyist tendency of the arts among us’’
(1986, 208). Through this poetic development, he has come to under-
stand that Shakespeare ‘‘holds no mirror up to nature but with his
imagination rivals nature’s composition with his own. He himself be-
comes ‘nature’—continuing ‘its’ marvels—if you will’’ (208). For Wil-
liams, Shakespeare’s timeless artistry proves that he is no mere copyist.
He again touches upon this artistic act of mirroring in his Autobiogra-
phy: ‘‘It is NOT to hold the mirror up to nature that the artist per-
forms his work. It is to make, out of the imagination, something not
at all a copy of nature, but something quite different, a new thing, un-
like any thing else in nature, a thing advanced and apart from it. . . .
by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover
in ourselves nature’s active part. This is enticing to our minds, it en-
larges the concept of art, dignifies it to a place not yet fully realized’’
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(1951, 241). Williams’s differentiation between copying and imitating

nature provides an intriguing distinction to consider. In the context of
this study, that notion of enlarging nature, becoming nature, or acti-
vating that part of nature within cannot help but to evoke Pollock’s
famous drip paintings. Lee Krasner, artist and wife of Pollock, recalls
an exchange between Pollock and Hans Hoffman about this subject.
According to Krasner, after Hoffman looked at Pollock’s work, he re-
marked, ‘‘You do not work from nature’’ (Karmel 1999, 28). Pollock’s
memorable and revealing response—‘‘I am nature.’’ In light of Wil-
liams’s idea about the artist’s need to imitate nature, Pollock’s claim
becomes less egotistical and more understandable. Krasner’s commen-
tary about Pollock’s response is also telling, particularly in regard to
this study’s exploration of the American qualities shared by these art-
ists. She tells the interviewer Bruce Glaser: ‘‘I think this statement ar-
ticulates an important difference between French painting and what
followed. It breaks once and for all the concept that was still more or
less present in Cubist derived painting, that one sits and observes na-
ture that is out there. Rather, it claims a oneness’’ (28). Ultimately
Emerson himself called upon artists to achieve such oneness.
Pollock’s reintroduction into this discussion is also intriguing in
consideration of Williams’s Autobiography. No doubt, ‘‘The American
Spirit in Art’’ was not far from Williams’s mind. In fact, in this chapter
he tells an anecdote about Alanson Hartpence and a female customer’s
inquiry of ‘‘paint,’’ which he also shares in his address. Preceding the
lines quoted above from his Autobiography, Williams actually discusses
his ideas about copying and imitation within the context of abstract
painting: ‘‘The objective is not to copy nature and never was, but to
imitate nature, which involved active invention, the active work of the
imagination . . . A man makes a picture, it is made of paint upon canvas
stretched on a frame. . . . One doesn’t paint an ‘‘abstract painting.’’
One makes a painting. If it is a dull painting, an unimaginative paint-
ing, if the elements of paint are emptily used, the painting would prove
empty even though it represented some powerful dictator or a thesis
of Sartre’’ (1951a, 241). Although Williams cites Virginia Woolf as an
example of the ‘‘active work of the imagination,’’ it’s possible to envi-
sion Pollock’s presence behind these lines, particularly in terms of the
artist’s ‘‘active invention.’’ Pollock understood the sensitive nature of
creation: ‘‘I have no fears about making changes, destroying the
image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it
come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the
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result is a mess’’ (Karmel 1999, 18). That notion of contact would no

doubt appeal to Williams who believed that such contact—whether in
art or human relations—engendered a sense of authenticity.
Concerning David Smith’s views of imitation and reflection, there
initially seems to be a distinction from Williams: ‘‘We do not imitate
nature’’ (1968, 169). Yet as Smith continues, it seems that what he has
in mind concerns not so much imitation as Williams and Pollock sug-
gest, but the notion of static copying: ‘‘We are not the mirror of the
external world / that is the camera / We are not even the illusionistic
mirror’’ (169). Through a series of negations, Smith clears space for
the artist away from a programmatic expression of nature. He de-
clares, ‘‘if we mirror at all it is our own personal vision / with a state-
ment that the artist is unique and individual—/ dedicated and
growing.’’ Like Williams and Pollock, Smith concentrates the reflec-
tive power within the individuality of the artist. That belief in the art-
ist’s unique vision is what ultimately enables growth and the
progression of a unique imaginative expression.
Smith as Poet
Unlike Pollock, Smith articulated a stronger relationship between

art and poetry. He conceived of his own sculpture in relation to
poetry. He wrote that his imaginative creations begin in a variety of
ways, from found objects, to no objects to happenstance: ‘‘I want to be
like a poet, in a sense’’ (78). Smith’s happened-on creativity parallels
certain aspects of Williams’s own creation of poems rooted in the con-
versation and images of his daily doctoring.
Smith also wrote poetry. It certainly does not rival Williams or
O’Hara’s verse, but it reveals the scope of Smith’s artistic interests.
Here is a provocative untitled poem.
There is something rather noble about junk—selected junk—

junk which has in one era performed nobly in function for
common man—
He then observes that such junk has yet to achieve the status of ‘‘relic
or antique,’’ but it has been ‘‘left for me—/ to be found as the cracks
in the sidewalks’’ (1968, 152). Such lines seem to echo Williams’s
‘‘Pastoral’’ (1917), a poem where the speaker walks back streets ‘‘ad-
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miring the houses / of the very poor’’ (1986, 64). Of particular note to
Williams’s speaker is what many would perceive as ‘‘junk’’—‘‘the
yards cluttered / with old chicken wire’’ and the ‘‘furniture gone
wrong.’’ Williams also mentions
. . . parts of boxes, all,

if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
(1986, 64)
Like Smith, the speaker continues to see something useful in these

discarded objects and to perceive beauty in the crudity of his dilapi-
dated modern locale. For Williams’s speaker, however, there is a soli-
tary feeling that comes with such perception:
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
(65)
Smith understood the importance of such ‘‘junk’’ to the artist. He told

Thomas Hess in an interview, ‘‘I don’t know what useless things are’’
(Hess 1964, 2).7 His own poem concludes by comparing his discovery
of this ‘‘junk’’ with more natural discoveries, such as those found in
‘‘the grain of wood,’’ ‘‘drops in grass,’’ and even floating clouds. His
discovery of this junk is now
to be arranged
to be now perceived
by new ownership
(1968, 152)
As his comparison suggests, Smith sees a natural process in the trans-

formation of once useful objects into junk and eventually into art. This
process depends upon the artist’s perception to see the intrinsic beauty
in junk and reintegrate it into a new creative expression. In Williams’s
poem, the perception of these materials creates its own form of poetic
value—the overlooked, dismissed materials of the back streets now
garner extraordinary power. Although the uneven line breaks in
Smith’s poem fail to achieve the same rhythm as Williams’s poem, his
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use of the shorter line seems an exploration of form much in the style
of Williams.
The Making of an American Art
Smith’s poem also expresses his artistic beliefs about found objects.
Smith saw transformative potential inherent in such things: ‘‘Forms
in function are often not appreciated in their context except for their
mechanical performance. With time and the passing of these functions
and a separation of their parts, a metaphoric change can take place
permitting a new unity, one that is strictly visual’’ (1968, 74). Smith
cites his Agricola series, which incorporates old farming implements
in its designs, as displaying this idea. The series consists of seventeen
sculptures made between the years 1951 to 1959 (Tucker 2006, 69).
Like Williams’s Spring and All, the numbering of sculptures does not
follow a chronological order; for instance, Agricola XII appeared be-
fore XI (70). The series draws heavily from America’s agrarian past.
‘‘By incorporating found iron and steel parts from farm implements,’’
O’Hara writes, ‘‘and factory-ordered steel parts such as I-beams and
concave discs in his work, Smith utilized his American milieu’’ (1975,
61). The use of these historicized American materials demonstrates
Smith’s engagement rather than repulsion of his artistic origins. For
Williams, it is the backstreets of the poor or the broken glass behind
the wings of the hospital. For O’Hara, it is the malt shop and hard hats
on Manhattan streets. Smith does the same in his medium to produce
dynamic works of art. For instance, Agricola IX, 1952 consists of a se-
ries of seven open-ended loops, differing in size and placement along
a horizontal base. Each of these loops extends from separate curved
rods; the rods of only two loops join at a common point on the spine
along with a t-shaped extension. As you move around Agricola IX, oc-
casionally peering through its varying loops, you see beyond discarded
parts and comprehend a new whole that reshapes the space it contains.
Smith’s sculpture asks the viewer to move around it, experience it
from different vantage points and explore the nuances of its varying
angles. By doing this, one discovers and gains a new perspective on
the sculpture at each movement.
Beyond the nonsequential numbering of works, Smith’s Agricola se-
ries offers an intriguing connection to several poems from Williams’s
Spring and All, ‘‘The Farmer’’ and ‘‘The Red Wheelbarrow.’’ In both
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Agricola IX, 1952 photo by David Smith Estate of David Smith / Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
poems Williams makes use of elements found in an agrarian locale to

offer an imaginative release. In ‘‘The Farmer,’’ he portrays the figure
of a farmer amid ‘‘his blank fields’’ that on the surface appear inhospi-
table. Along with a ‘‘cold wind,’’ there are ‘‘browned weeds’’ and
‘‘March clouds’’ (1986, 186). Despite this dreariness, the farmer does
not seem paralyzed or immobilized in this setting. Quite the contrast,
he is ‘‘in deep thought’’ and ‘‘pacing through the rain.’’ He remains
both intellectually and physically active in his fields. Like the earlier
poem ‘‘Spring and All,’’ this harsh external appearance masks the
imaginative potential residing in this place. The farmer knows this.
All of this seeming darkness, as Williams writes, ‘‘leaving room for
thought.’’ The poem closes by recasting the farmer’s image:
Down past the brushwood

bristling by the rainsluiced wagonroad
looms the artist figure of
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the farmer—composing
—antagonist
In describing the farmer as artist, Williams reinforces the notion of

the poet as one who walks his fields, knows his fields, and through
imaginative contact can compose something new from them. Williams
values both the process and product of such artistic cultivation. Con-
sidering his selection of the word agricola, the Latin term for farmer,
Smith’s own sculptural series represents a similar contact with materi-
als rooted in the fields of Bolton Landing that resulted in new and
imaginative works.
‘‘The Red Wheelbarrow’’ moves beyond just a conceptual link with
Smith’s Agricola series and actually makes use of an agrarian imple-
ment. In the context of Smith’s words, Williams demonstrates how
the poet can take a common object like a wheelbarrow and move it
beyond a static function or singular meaning. He describes a red wheel
barrow in relation to other common things—‘‘rain / water’’ and
‘‘white / chickens’’ (1986, 224). In a series of four brief, carefully
crafted stanzas he reveals how ‘‘so much’’ truly does depend upon the
capacity to see the interrelationship between these common things.
This deceptively simple poem, with its unique design and vivid im-
ages, creates an effect on the reader similar to the way a viewer sees
Smith’s Agricola IX. With each pass, one gains some new perspective.
The poem tends not to limit meaning but rather fosters active engage-
ment and possibilities. After all, what does that abstract phrase ‘‘so
much depends / upon’’ actually mean in regard to these specific ob-
jects? Williams provides no concrete answer. As evident in the ample
critical discourse surrounding the poem, this ambiguity only encour-
ages readers to engage imaginatively with the words, to shape their
own vision of the images, and to construct their own reading of the
poem’s meaning. Closely following ‘‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’’ in the
prose portion of Spring and All, Williams writes, ‘‘The same things
exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination’’
(224). This energized process is, in fact, what occurs when poets like
Williams and artists like Smith take the ordinary and seemingly use-
less things surrounding them and create their unique works of art.
Besides the ordinary, Williams and Smith embraced in their artistry
the crudity of American culture. ‘‘One of the good things about Amer-
ican art’’ Smith writes, ‘‘is that it doesn’t have the spit and polish that
some foreign art has. It is coarse. One of its virtues is coarseness’’
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(1968, 77). In his biting cultural critique The Great American Novel,
Williams persistently references the lack of ‘‘culture’’ in America. ‘‘I
am an American. A United Stateser,’’ he declares at one point. ‘‘Yes,
it’s ugly, there is no word to say it better’’ (1970, 175). Despite such
an admission, Williams refuses to turn away from this ugliness.
In association with America’s coarse cultural identity, Smith, like
Williams, seems to see its potential for beauty. Again, I turn to his
words to clarify: ‘‘it may be society’s vulgarity, but it is my beauty. . . .
Despite the subject of brutality, the appreciation must show love. The
rape of man by war machine will show the poetic use of form in its
making. The beauties of nature do not conceal destruction and degen-
eration’’ (1968, 77). Here Smith transforms the vulgarity to his
‘‘beauty.’’ The key to this transformation is the artist’s attention and
sensitivity to the stated ‘‘vulgarity’’ and brutality.
Smith’s words call to mind Williams’s repeated references to the
‘‘Beautiful Thing.’’ In Williams’s In the American Grain, Columbus
describes the New World as ‘‘the most beautiful thing which I had
ever seen’’ (1925, 26). Later, in the 1937 poem ‘‘Paterson: Episode
17,’’ the ‘‘Beautiful Thing’’ refers to an African-American woman bru-
talized by local men. The guys from Newark gang rape her; the guys
from Paterson rescue her and then ‘‘socked’’ her ‘‘across the nose’’
(1986, 441–42). She has been ‘‘made’’ by these men, just as the poet
attempts to make her through the ‘‘beat’’ of his lines. Yet her resis-
tance to a limited, fixed representation pushes him beyond poetic con-
ventions to discover a form that expresses her true nature.
The ‘‘Beautiful Thing’’ reappears in Paterson, Book III. He juxta-
poses lines from ‘‘Paterson: Episode 17’’ with lines related to Cathol-
ina Lambert’s drive to break a workers’ strike.8 Dr. Paterson then
seems to give voice to the same brutality, as he looks to ‘‘make’’ her.
. . . TAKE OFF YOUR

CLOTHES! I didn’t ask you
to take off your skin . I said your
clothes, your clothes. You smell
like a whore. I ask you to bathe in my
opinions, the astonishing virtue of your
lost body . . .
(1992, 105–6)
These lines, according to James Breslin, reveal ‘‘how Paterson, in his

demands for a pure beauty, is himself implicated in the maiming and
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violating of natural beauty’’ (1970, 193). Later on, in section 2 of Book

Three, Dr. Paterson descends to the basement where she recovers
from the rape. This time he treats her differently—he is ‘‘shaken’’ by
the beaten woman’s beauty (1992, 126). She shows him the childhood
scars on her legs. ‘‘Instead of trying to force his righteous opinions
upon her ‘lost body,’ ’’ Breslin asserts, ‘‘he lets her physical being speak
silently to him’’ (1970, 194). He therefore takes a more sensitive ap-
proach to her and moves beyond a desire to control her representa-
tion. By the close of the section, Peter Schmidt believes that he
demonstrates a ‘‘new willingness to find beauty in this world, not an
ideal one of his own making’’ (1988, 185).
Like Williams, Smith clearly understood the inherent complexity of
the materials that he used in making his sculptures. In discussing his
use of steel, he wrote, ‘‘It is structure, movement, progress, suspen-
sion, cantilever and at times destruction and beauty’’ (1968, 54). In
another elaboration about steel, he again keys in on its movement,
power, and brutality: ‘‘Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the
movement associated with it . . . Yet it is also brutal: the rapist, the
murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring’’ (Anfam
1990, 40).
No doubt if Smith read Williams to any extent, he also found a poet
who shared similar ideas about the ways machinery could influence
modern artistic creation. Now, as discussed in chapter 1, Williams fa-
mously declared in The Wedge that ‘‘A poem is a small (or large) ma-
chine made of words’’ (1988, 54). His unique description related to
his belief ‘‘that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is
redundant.’’ O’Hara appears to echo this dictum in ‘‘Memorial Day,
1950’’ when he exclaims, ‘‘Poetry is as useful as a machine!’’ (1995,
18). For Williams, the correlation of poetry and machinery resides in
a desire for efficiency in the poetic line. He strove for such essentiality
within his own verse, as evident in a poem like ‘‘A Sort of a Song.’’ For
him, poetry distinguishes itself from prose when ‘‘pruned to a perfect
economy’’ (1988, 54). Without such economy, the poem’s inherent
rhythm becomes compromised: ‘‘As in all machines its movement is
intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a
poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of
the speech from which it arises’’ (54). For Williams, this movement
directly connects to the materials from which the poem derives—the
language. Because American speech patterns are unique, as Williams
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has repeatedly asserted, American poetry would be distinct from En-

glish poetry.
For Williams, the same seems to be true for sculpture. In his later
essay on Brancusi, he emphasizes a comparable goal. When comment-
ing on Fish (polished, green mottled marble), he claims, ‘‘Here Bran-
cusi has been at his greatest, eliminating all that is inessential until
the pure form comes out in all its simple dignity and conviction as we
veritably gasp to witness it’’ (1978, 254). For Williams, such efficiency
and essentiality result in a work of such clear intensity. David Smith
appears to share Williams’s desire for such essentiality and even uses
his own machine analogy: ‘‘My aim in material function is the same as
in locomotive building: to arrive at a given functional form in the most
efficient manner. The locomotive method bows to no accepted theory
of fabrication. It utilizes the respective merits of castings, forging, riv-
eting, arc and gas welding, brazing, silver solder, bolts, screws, shrink
fits, all because of their efficiency in arriving at an object or form in
function’’ (1968, 52). Smith’s analogy clearly draws upon the factory
experience that shaped his way of thinking about materials, creativity
and design. He parallels Williams’s ideas about functionality and
form. In fact, his preference for iron seems connected to its elemental
properties: ‘‘What it can do in arriving at form economically—no
other element can do’’ (50).
Along with the familiar materials used by both men, each stresses
the importance of ‘‘making’’ in the creation of their respective works.
Williams, one may recall from my earlier discussion of O’Hara’s ‘‘Me-
morial Day, 1950,’’ stresses this concept of making throughout his
preface to The Wedge. He explains that the poet ‘‘makes a poem’’ by
taking those words surrounding him and composing them ‘‘into an
intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may consti-
tute a revelation in the speech that he uses’’ (1988, 54). For Williams,
a poem that is true to the character of the speech from which it derives
ultimately leads to beauty. He writes, ‘‘One doesn’t seek beauty. All
that an artist or a Sperry can do is to drive toward his purpose, in the
nature of his materials, not to take gold where Babbitt metal is called
for; to make: make clear the complexity of his perceptions in the me-
dium given to him by inheritance, chance, accident or whatever it may
be to work with according to his talents and the will that drives them’’
(1988, 54) As discussed earlier in relation to O’Hara’s ‘‘Memorial Day,
1950,’’ such a process results in poems that achieve authenticity, origi-
nality, and revelatory power. Despite the differences in artistic voca-
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tions, the parallel to Smith is again intriguing. He, too, emphasizes

this notion of making in his sculptures: ‘‘I want to make one image, I
want to have controlled every make in it’’ (1968, 58). He foregoes
what some may deign the ‘‘gold’’ material in his sculptures and ulti-
mately discovers the inherent complexities and beauty within more
common materials. For Smith, this process includes the possibility for
what chance or accident may yield: ‘‘The conflict for realization is
what makes art not its certainty, nor its technique or material’’ (56).
One final parallel between Smith and Williams—a further emphasis
upon movement—ties both men to O’Hara and Pollock. For Smith,
this aesthetic quality manifests itself most visibly in his wheeled sculp-
tures. Sentinel III (1957) is the first of these sculptures; however, the
wheels seem to serve a utilitarian, rather than aesthetic purpose. Karen
Wilkin explains that Smith’s first use of wheels ‘‘may have originated
in his having placed work on a wheeled dolly to make it easier to
move’’ (1984, 77). Thus functionality may have stimulated ‘‘aesthetic
choice.’’ The wheels, although, do matter within an understanding of
a sculpture’s composition. In a May 1960 lecture, Smith explained,
‘‘the wheels have meaning, they are no more functional than wheels
on an Indian stone temple. It is playful idea projecting movement’’
(Ajac and Trotman 2006, 413).
It was not until the incredibly productive time he spent in 1962 at
Voltri that Smith turned greater attention to the way wheels could
work within the overall composition of his sculptures. Voltri VI, 1962
and Voltri VII, 1962 reflect this direction. They both utilize two wheels
opposed by a singular steel leg. Stanley Marcus contends that the Vol-
tri experience caused Smith to view wheels in ‘‘nearly reverential’’
terms (1983, 156). It also resulted in his increased awareness of the
totality of his sculptures. According to Marcus, ‘‘He resolved to per-
mit no ‘dead’ areas. Forms that previously had only a functional pur-
pose of supporting his images now came to function as images
themselves. . . . Smith came to use wheels, like musical instruments,
to convey a variety of otherwise inexpressible feelings’’ (1983, 157).
Later Smith featured wheels in his Wagon series. According to Wilkin,
‘‘Unlike the elongated, slightly flaccid Voltri chariots, the Wagons are
energetic, self-contained structures’’ (1984, 79). Wagon II offers an im-
pressive example of this series. The seemingly sagging spine of the
work rests on four opposing wheels. One wheel dwarfs the other three,
yet the entire work appears level. Wilkin argues that ‘‘[t]he uneven
sizes of the wheels adds to the sense of erratic energy.’’ On the center
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of its spine the sculptural wagon carries a totemic presence; Marcus

suggests this ‘‘fanciful’’ image could be ‘‘a rider in a carriage’’ (1983,
155). Walking around this massive piece, one senses the ‘‘tension’’ and
energy Wilkin describes. It contains imaginative potential for power-
ful motion. The work’s title itself, evocative of Smith’s own pioneer
stock, projects a sense of such forceful movement. In this context,
these modern Wagons epitomize that American spirit to push ahead
into the unknown to either forge a new life or create a new art.
In the end, a study of David Smith offers a compelling touchstone
for Williams’s relevance to New York School artists. The sculptor’s
work and words parallel several of Williams’s ideas about artistry, mo-
dernity, and America. By identifying these parallels, we see that a
wider variety of American artists shared Williams’s aesthetic goals by
mid-century. Frank O’Hara provides a vital link between these men.
Like Williams, he is arguably one of the most knowledgeable poets of
his generation concerning the trends occurring in the visual arts. Of
particular value, though, is not simply O’Hara’s reference to the sculp-
tor’s interest in Williams, but in O’Hara’s perception of the originality
and authenticity of their respective works. All three of these men have
an ability to take the ordinary and reveal through their artistry its ex-
traordinary properties. They also consistently push toward new forms
of expression in their particular mediums. In this way, the work of all
three ultimately point to ‘‘the new American artistic spirit.’’
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Conclusion
AS DEMONSTRATED THROUGH THIS STUDY, WILLIAM CARLOS WIL-

liams’s ties to the New York avant-garde did not end in the 1920s. He
continued to offer something to the changing members of this scene
throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as evident in Frank O’Hara’s avid
interest and appreciation of his verse. He also appeared to matter to a
range of visual artists. For the little known Romano, he provided sup-
port and friendship. For more renowned artists like Motherwell and
Smith, he shared a desire to challenge traditional forms and to dis-
cover new possibilities for modern artistic expression. For Williams’s
part, although uncertain about the trajectory of Abstract Expression-
ism, he recognized its cultural and artistic significance as evident in
repeated references to Pollock and Motherwell in his work.
Toward the end of his life, Williams continued to wrestle with the
meaning of abstract art. For instance, he wrote a three-stanza poem
entitled ‘‘The Art’’ (1961), which expresses the indefiniteness he asso-
ciated with abstraction. The speaker matter-of-factly describes the
process of observing and interpreting abstract work. He points out
how it can be called ‘‘anything’’—from ‘‘a / crocus clump’’ to ‘‘a new
laid breast’’ that is ‘‘hatched / by Modigliani’’ (1988, 378). The brevity
of the poem precludes any sustained description of a particular paint-
ing. The poem instead celebrates the speaker’s imaginative response
and participation in the painting’s meaning. After all, the speaker
looks at this work in the spring, a time Williams often associates with
newness and creativity. The fact that the literal painting cannot be de-
fined and evades easy categorization also would seem appealing to
Williams. On one hand, it could be that ‘‘crocus clump’’—art that imi-
tates, but does not copy nature. On the other hand, it could be some-
thing with more artistic origins ‘‘by Modigliani,’’ an artist whose style
itself resists easy categorization.
Yet, as this study proves, as much as Williams entertained such un-
certainty, he struggled to embrace the ongoing presence of abstract
146
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CONCLUSION 147
art. In a December 24, 1959, letter to Donald Allen, he concludes by

saying, ‘‘Well, the turn of the painters against abstraction has come
not a moment too soon for me’’ (1959c, Donald Allen Collection).
After this movement toward abstraction, what would come next? His
writing about Emanuel Romano’s painting, in part, reveals this con-
cern over contemporary art. He never satisfactorily answered this
question and through the course of the 1950s eventually turned
toward something more familiar—the works of a painter like
Brueghel. Originally his Brueghel poems were published in the Hud-
son Review, the same magazine where Joseph Bennett once ‘‘ham-
mered’’ his experimental poetics. Later on, these poems became
Pictures from Brueghel (1962), garnering Williams the 1963 Pulitzer
Prize for poetry. According to Mike Weaver, ‘‘In returning to this vi-
sual mode in the very late Fifties he was turning away from the Sub-
jectivism implicit in the Projectivist version of Measure, which had
discovered what was for him an all-too-apt analogy for itself in Action
painting. When reflection gives way to action the tradition of the new
finally subverts the tradition of the old. Williams would not go so far;
his return to realism in the Brueghel poems marks a newly acquired
sense of personality in the work of art’’ (1966, 21). After the debacle
with his second commentary on Romano and his continued uncer-
tainty over the Abstract Expressionists, the work of Brueghel pre-
sented Williams with more secure footing from which to comment
and create.
Yet it is not just Brueghel where Williams returned. He dedicated
Paterson V (1958) to the painter Henri Toulouse Lautrec. When asked
by Walter Sutton about Toulouse-Lautrec’s importance, Williams de-
scribed him as ‘‘a man that respected the truth of the design’’ (1976,
54). For Williams, he made no judgment regarding a woman: ‘‘what
the hell difference is it to him that she’s a whore? He was indifferent
to it, and the poet is also indifferent to it.’’ Paterson V also focuses upon
the famous Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum. In section 2,
he identifies what he perceives as the make-up of the true artist:
. . . you cannot be
an artist
by mere ineptitude
The dream
is in the pursuit!
(1992, 219)
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148 CONCLUSION
This ‘‘pursuit’’ of imaginative creations informs the approach of such

an artist. Immediately following this description he references the
work of an early abstractionist:
The neat figures of

Paul Klee
fill the canvas
but that
is not the work
of a child .
the cure began, perhaps
with the abstraction
of Arabic art
(1992, 219–20)
Williams’s choice of Paul Klee as such an artist is noteworthy. Klee

was a member of the Blaue Reiter group that also included an early
Williams favorite—Wassily Kandinsky. The assertion that Klee’s
painting is ‘‘not the work / of a child’’ marks an important distinction,
especially considering Williams’s fear that the later trend toward ab-
straction might lead to the belief that ‘‘the scribblings’’ of five-year-
olds were art. Klee’s early form of abstraction seems ‘‘neat’’ and in
control—one can assume, from Williams’s perspective, informed by
‘‘blessed’’ design. These ‘‘neat figures’’ also seem an outgrowth of ‘‘the
cure.’’ Such a notion again seems to allude to Kandinsky, particularly
the curative properties that he associated with art. He also mentions
other artists who shared such an artistic pursuit. He references Dürer’s
Melancholy, Leonardo’s La Gioconda, and Bosch’s ‘‘congeries of tor-
tured souls and devils / who prey on them’’ (220). The list reveals both
the old and the new, particularly when he references Freud, Picasso,
and Juan Gris (one of Williams’s favorites). Yet it should be noted the
list does not include newer artists like Motherwell or Pollock. Wil-
liams’s regard for these two never reached the levels it did for painters
like Gris, Matisse, or Picasso. The appearance of this tribute to the
painters, though, reveals that Williams could never stop thinking
about the relationship between word and image. In these references,
he clearly sought a way to both honor and continue to create from
influential figures that he both respected and understood.
For his part, Frank O’Hara continued to explore and promote
avant-garde poets and artists throughout his life. As this study argues,
Williams played an influential role in O’Hara’s poetic development.
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CONCLUSION 149
However, as pointed out early on, Williams’s influence on O’Hara was

not exclusive. He had a passionate interest in so many different early
modernists—James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Guillaume
Apollinaire, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others. He also had interest,
and in some cases close friendships, with a range of different contem-
porary poets—John Ashbery, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory
Corso, and Leroi Jones, again to name but a few. Further research in
relation to any one of these writers would no doubt result in an even
greater understanding and appreciation of the depth and richness of
O’Hara’s verse.
Just as O’Hara cannot be limited to the influence of one poet, it is
a mistake to see his interest in painting beginning and ending solely in
Abstract Expressionism. His work as an art critic and curator reflects
a continuing effort to promote painters he admired. This seems espe-
cially true in the work of painters who come to prominence following
the first generation of New York School artists like Larry Rivers. In
‘‘Larry Rivers: A Memoir,’’ O’Hara praises Rivers as ‘‘one of the best
draftsmen in contemporary art and one of the most subtle and particu-
lar colorists’’ (1983, 173). He collaborated with Rivers on a variety of
projects, including the aforementioned play Kenneth Koch: A Tragedy.
They also collaborated on Stones, a series of lithographs created from
1957–60. O’Hara even posed for Rivers in O’Hara Nude with Boots,
1954. Jasper Johns, an artist also evading easy codification, became
quite close to O’Hara. He eventually painted In Memory of My Feel-
ings—Frank O’Hara (1961), a work inspired by O’Hara’s poem, and
he later created Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara), 1961–70, a work that
uses a plaster cast of O’Hara’s foot that presses into a box of sand. In
1962 for Kulchur, he described Johns as ‘‘a very misunderstood artist,
whose art presents to many something easily assimilable and under-
stood, but Johns is one of the most mysterious artists of our time’’
(1983, 131). Rivers and Johns are just two of the many visual artists
who shared close relationships with O’Hara. As evident in the scope
of these friendships, O’Hara refused to align himself rigidly with one
movement or one artist. In response to Edward Lucie Smith’s ques-
tion about what most excites him in modern American art, he ex-
plained, ‘‘Well, they’re all individual qualities. I would really just have
to name a lot of artists. I don’t find that one year I’m excited by ab-
stract expressionism, the next year by pop art, the next year by op art,
and then this coming year by spatial sculpture, or something. . . . It all
is in the same environment which I live in’’ (1983, 6). Such a response
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150 CONCLUSION
gets at the heart of what makes O’Hara such a fascinating figure in art
and poetry. He evinces an openness to experience and explore a range
of styles and work.
In closing, both O’Hara’s and Williams’s engagement with Abstract
Expressionism is telling. Williams eventually saw its importance in
both cultural terms, as evident in ‘‘The American Spirit in Art,’’ and
artistic terms, the challenging and progressive nature of the avant-
garde. Although in the 1950s he could not wholeheartedly commit
himself to it, Frank O’Hara did. O’Hara’s work with these artists and
his own verse reflect his capacity to not only revere and admire the
older Williams, but to move beyond him in the development and ex-
pression of his own poetic voice. Ultimately, though, both poets share
with the visual artists discussed a desire for the new, a search for the
authentic, and a determination to draw the reader into the moment of
artistic creation. It is in this way that Williams, O’Hara, and the Ab-
stract Expressionists offer us a way of not merely reliving a past mo-
ment, but of challenging our attentiveness to the details and design
inherent in the act of creating something new.
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Notes
Chapter 1. ‘‘Better Than the Movies’’

1. The list here is extensive and filled with so many accomplished scholars—
Christopher MacGowan, Peter Schmidt, and Terrence Diggory, among others, have
provided in-depth studies that persuasively demonstrate the need to understand Wil-
liams’s relationship with the painters to better understand his experimentations and
artistry.
2. I have had this observation validated in a variety of ways through the years.
Perhaps the most memorable time occurred during a talk I gave in 2003 at the Cul-
tural Arts Center in Brick, New Jersey, in 2003. A member of the audience spoke up
when I made a similar comment and told the audience I was right. He said he had
been a patient of Dr. Williams when he was a child and they only knew him as a
physician.
3. It also should be mentioned that there have to be moments of let down in re-
gard to artistic productivity—it is difficult (nearly impossible) to maintain such a cre-
ative pace.
4. This letter originally looks to be dated Tuesday, January 19, 1953; however,
this date is crossed out and the following appears atop the letter: ‘‘To Jane Frelicher,
from Southampton 19 January 1954?’’
5. Here are the titles: ‘‘Chez Jane,’’ ‘‘For James Dean,’’ ‘‘Ode,’’ ‘‘Why I am not a
Painter,’’ ‘‘In Memory of My Feelings,’’ ‘‘Ode to Joy,’’ ‘‘To Hell With It,’’ ‘‘Ode:
Salute to the French Negro Poets,’’ ‘‘Ode to Michael Goldberg,’’ ‘‘The Day Lady
Died,’’ ‘‘You are Gorgeous and I’m Coming,’’ ‘‘Poem (Hate . . . ),’’ ‘‘Poem (Khru-
shchev),’’ ‘‘In Favor of One’s Time,’’ and ‘‘Hotel Transylvanie.’’
6. Bob Arnold, Cid Corman’s literary executor, pointed out to me that Cid Cor-
man might not say the same about O’Hara if he was alive today.
7. Although I have been unable to locate Williams referencing O’Hara in corre-
spondence I have reviewed, I will not be shocked if a letter referencing O’Hara turns
up in subsequent research.
Chapter 2. ‘‘American Spirit in Art’’

1. In email correspondence dated August 1, 2006, with Richard Geldard, senior
advisor to RWE.org and renowned Emerson scholar, I was notified that Emerson
never wrote the following lines. According to the professor ‘‘There is no record in
the Complete Works of Emerson making such a statement. . . . And he only used the
151
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152 NOTES
verb ‘consummate’ twice in all his works and not in that usage. . . . So, one has to
suppose that Williams was wrong in his attribution. Emerson is wrongfully attributed
often, whenever a passage has a certain ring to it.’’
2. All excerpts of Robert Motherwell text appearing in this book Dedalus
Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
3. Apparently, as evident ‘‘The Profession of Poetry and M. Maritain,’’ Wil-
liams’s work inspired Rosenberg to enter the foray. In this essay, he makes a strong
case for Poe’s influence on modern poetry.
Chapter 3. ‘‘Blobs of Paint’’
1. An earlier and briefer version of this chapter appears in Ian Copestake’s collec-
tion of essays entitled The Legacy of William Carlos Williams: Points of Contact (Cam-
bridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
2. The letter is dated January 16, 1951. However, based upon Porter’s reply, it
appears the year is actually 1952.
3. According to Gooch’s biography City Poet, the poem was composed the day
after Pollock’s funeral (1993, 290).
4. It should be noted that Williams and O’Hara appeared together in another
issue of Evergreen Review (1957 vol. 2, no. 7). Williams contributed ‘‘E.E. Cum-
mings’’; O’Hara contributed ‘‘About Zhivago and His Poems.’’
5. Several critics note that Ralph Manheim most likely provided the painting with
its title; however, as noted by B. H. Friedman, ‘‘Pollock had final approval of the titles,
and they clearly convey a sense of his artistic ambitions and concerns’’ (Firestone
2005, 402).
6. For a discussion of Joyce and Pollock see Landau 173–74, as well as Evan R.
Firestone’s essay ‘‘James Joyce and the First Generation New York School’’ (2005).
For a brief discussion of O’Hara’s interest in Joyce, consult Brad Gooch’s City Poet,
specifically pages 48–49, 107–8. Apparently O’Hara brought Ulysses on his tour of
duty during World War II (79). For a preliminary discussion of Williams and Joyce
consult Paul Mariani’s William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. Mariani notes
that Ulysses was being published in The Little Review at the same time Williams’s ex-
perimental improvisations appeared (149).
7. According to the library catalog provided in Francis O’Connor’s Jackson Pollock:
A Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works (1978), Pollock did not
own any of Williams’s books. However, he did have the only issue of the magazine
Now (August 1941), which contains ‘‘Midas: A Proposal for a Magazine’’ (O’Connor
1978, 197). In that essay, Williams addresses the manifestation of the ‘‘revolutionary
element’’: ‘‘If the concern be painting, to celebrate what new thrusts will stand upon
the shoulders of surrealism and to discern a new horizon beyond that’’ (1969, 241).
Pollock also had a copy of Contact (vol. 1, no. 2, 1932), which Williams edited. Two
Williams poems appear here: ‘‘The Cod Head’’ and ‘‘The Canada Lily.’’ In his
‘‘Comment,’’ Williams commemorates Hart Crane’s death and talks about embracing
American culture—‘‘This primitive and actual America must sober us’’ (Mariani 1981,
327).
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NOTES 153
8. My reading of this poem opened up tremendously after a lengthy discussion

held at the 2007 William Carlos Williams Conference held in Frankfurt, Germany.
9. Most notably, B. H. Friedman offered this observation (1995, 121) and Eliza-
beth Frank (1983, 66). Frank also refers to the painting as Number 1A, 1948. It is my
understanding that the painting is referenced by both titles. O’Hara’s monograph on
Pollock is actually listed as a bibliographic reference under catalogue number 186,
number 1A, 1948, in the O’Connor Catalogue Raisonne. It appears that the letter
‘‘A’’ designation occurred as an effort by Betty Parsons to clarify unsold 1948 paint-
ings from 1949 works appearing in her gallery (1).
10. Although O’Hara goes on to relate this comment to Number 1, 1949, it is im-
portant to note that he is addressing this particular period of Pollock’s artistry. It also
appears to pick-up on his emphasis of ‘‘seeing’’ emphasized in his ‘‘Digression.’’
11. Besides this word, Williams also uses an unclear phrase earlier in the first
stanza ‘‘animadvertent / cissiform.’’ It is unclear exactly what may be the meaning of
this phrase. Animadvert means ‘‘to pass criticism or censure’’; the more obsolete
meaning ‘‘to notice’’ seems more likely yet the word does not appear as a verb. ‘‘Cissi-
form’’ also lacks definitional clarity. Williams could be playing with the base of the
word as cissy or cissus, a genus of the grape family. It also may relate to cissing, a
process for preparing wood for graining. With uncertainty over the actual words used,
the phrase resists a lucid reading. Clearly, though, he uses the phrase as a further
descriptor of the trees.
12. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. This handwritten addition appears on page 10 in folder 3 labeled ‘‘Paterson
V Notes and Rough Draft.’’
13. Ibid. This change appears on page 8 in folder 2 labeled ‘‘Paterson V Early
Draft.’’
14. Owned by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: Charles
Sheeler Papers, 1938–1965, [Microfilm reel 1811].
15. Coincidentally the poem first appeared in Yugen 5 (1959) alongside Williams’s
‘‘A Formal Design’’ (Magee 2004, 47). Williams’s poem depicts the ‘‘The Unicorn in
Captivity’’ tapestry from the ‘‘Hunt of the Unicorn’’ series featured so prominently
in Paterson V (Williams 1988, 509). The placement of these poems in Yugen offers yet
another intriguing pairing of the poets, one suggestive of their distinct interests in
past and present artistic expressions.
Chapter 4. ‘‘A Blossoming of the Spirit’’

1. An earlier version of this chapter appears in the William Carlos Williams Review
guest edited by Ian Copestake.
2. The first announcement appeared December 3, 1951, entitled ‘‘Museum to
Show Sculpture of U.S.; Metropolitan Exhibition Friday to Have Work by Americans
Using Many Techniques’’ (37); the second announcement printed December 9, 1951,
‘‘Diverse One-Man Shows; Sculpture at Metropolitan a Victorian Favorite’’ (135).
3. Prior to those late 1951 notices, it should be noted that Romano did garner
public attention in the Times for his artistry. From May 1937 up until the end of 1951,
Romano was mentioned thirty-one times in the paper, including a notice for a radio
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154 NOTES
appearance on WQXR on May 15, 1951. In the same period, Pollock was mentioned
in forty-six entries and Robert Motherwell forty times.
4. Adlow’s article ‘‘Emanuel Romano, Painter’’ appears under the Press Clippings
portion of Romano’s papers. The brief essay is undated and comes from an unknown
source. As Adlow references Romano as thirty-six years old, one can assume that it
was written around 1933. Reel 69–60.
5. According to Judith Berdy, president and historian of the Roosevelt Island His-
torical Society, the building was demolished in the 1960s.
6. The article appeared on page 26 September 15, 1937; it also included a photo
of the mural with several spectators looking on.
7. Friedman does admit that ‘‘there was much overlapping’’ between the divisions
and that behind it all was a genuine ‘‘need for economic help’’ (1995, 35).
8. Through the course of her own argument, Frank offers a clear, succinct over-
view of the critical arguments regarding the artistic value of these paintings (1983,
87–95). Her study has been particularly helpful in my own understanding of the artis-
tic merit in Pollock’s later work.
9. Emanuel Romano’s diary can be found among his papers held by the Archives
of American Art. In transcribing portions of the journal, I attempted to offer the most
accurate reading of his handwriting, which at times is difficult to decipher. I did not
include commentary that I found unclear and too difficult to accurately quote.
10. The Autobiography edition I am citing does not have a paginated foreword. This
quote appears on the second page of the foreword.
11. This quote and the previous one appear on the third page of the foreword.
12. This quote comes from the fourth and final page of the foreword.
13. Unless otherwise noted, the letters from Williams to Romano come from the
William Carlos Williams Collection at the University of Delaware. The letters from
Romano to Williams come from the William Carlos Williams Papers at the Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
14. The museum has since changed its name to the ‘‘Israel Bible Museum.’’ Also,
I should note that it has been somewhat difficult to track down a lot of specific details
regarding Romano’s travels during this period of time. Early on in my research Char-
lotte Snyder Sholod was very helpful in providing useful information about Romano;
she was working on a comprehensive project related to Glicenstein and Romano prior
to her untimely death.
15. At first, it was unclear about the specific award Romano references. The Bol-
lingen Prize had been awarded to Williams in January of 1953 (Mariani 1981, 658).
However, upon further research, it appears that Romano is referencing the $5,000.00
fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. In an article entitled ‘‘William Car-
los Williams Wins Poets’ Academy Prize of $5,000,’’ the New York Times announced
this award on December 28, 1956 (two days before Romano’s letter to Williams).
Chapter 5. Efficiency in Form

1. David Smith text appearing in this book Estate of David Smith/Licensed by
VAGA, New York, NY.
2. In email correspondence with Susan Cooke, associate director of the David
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NOTES 155
Smith Estate, it is unknown whether Smith owned any of Williams’s poetry. To date,
Smith’s library does not contain any books by Williams or O’Hara. However, there
is no way to know for sure if he owned copies during his lifetime.
3. This quote appears on page thirteen of the typescript sent to David Smith.
4. This quote appears on page one of the typescript.
5. This quote appears on page two of the typescript.
6. He also references Pound and Stevens. The Stevens reference conveys the
aloofness the speaker feels for the great modernist: (1995, 439). Later he playfully
distances his poem from Pound’s warnings against usury. (466).
7. This quote appears on page two of the typescript interview.
8. In my previous book, William Carlos Williams’ Poetic Response to the 1913 Pater-
son Silk Strike, I offer background on Lambert’s role in the strike (2002, 165–69). I
also should acknowledge this book for its reading of the ‘‘Beautiful Thing,’’ which has
been reworked into this current study.
................. 17540$ NOTE 12-08-09 13:39:29 PS PAGE 155

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Index
Abstract Expressionism, 16, 19–20, 25, Copestake, Ian, 14, 55, 152 n. 1, 153 n. 1
30–31, 49–51, 53, 64–66, 68, 71–73, Corman, Cid, 48–49, 151 n. 6
77, 92–93, 99, 105, 109, 146, 149–50 Corso, Gregory, 49, 149
Adlow, Dorothy, 100, 154 n. 4 Crane, Hart, 149, 152 n. 7
Allen, Donald, 30, 47–49, 77, 132, 147. Creeley, Robert, 14, 36, 48, 49
See also New American Poetry, The
Altieri, Charles, 18–19 Dahlberg, Edward, 52, 71
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 149 Davis, Stuart, 118, 120–21
Art New York, 122, 128–29 de Kooning, Willem, 17, 74, 92, 93, 106,
Artaud, Antonin, 113 121
Ashbery, John, 15, 28–29, 44, 46, 49, 74, Demuth, Charles, 25, 50
79, 82, 105, 149 Dewey, John, 36–37
Ayden, Erje, 122 Di Prima, Diane, 46
Dickinson, Emily, 13
Baraka, Amiri, 48. See also Jones, LeRoi Doolittle, Hilda, 49
Beck, Julian, 25 Doty, Mark , 15
Beckett, Samuel, 100 Dreiser, Theodore, 123, 128
Bennett, Joseph, 40–42, 147 Duncan, Robert, 36–37, 50
Benton, Thomas Hart, 69 Dürer, Albrecht, 148
Berkson, Bill, 67, 69, 129–30 Edison, Thomas, 14
Bishop, Elizabeth, 48 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 105
Bizardel, Yvon, 117 Eliot, T. S., 41–42, 100, 103
Bolton Landing, 119–23, 127, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19, 29–31, 34–
Bosch, Hieronymous, 148 35, 52–59, 68–71, 87–88, 90, 126, 135,
Brancusi, Constantin, 118, 120–22, 143 151–52 n. 1; ‘‘The American Scholar,’’
Breton, André, 61–62 55, 68, 88; ‘‘Circles,’’ 34, 57, 90; Na-
Brueghel, Pieter, 91, 117, 147 ture, 57; ‘‘The Poet,’’ 54–58, 126
Budnik, Dan, 120, 125 ‘‘Self-Reliance,’’ 87
Burke, Kenneth, 52, 105 Evergreen Review, 19, 49, 75–76, 97,
Bushnell, Horace, 55 152 n. 4
Button, John, 132
Federal Art Project, 100–101
Calas, Nicholas, 61 Feldman, Morton, 42
Cézanne, Paul, 108, 115 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 49
Clouet, 110 Freilicher, Jane, 27, 42, 44–45
Club, the, 25–26, 43, 91 Freud, Sigmund, 49, 89, 104, 105, 113,
Coles, Robert, 14 148
Collins, Billy, 15 Frost, Robert, 13
164
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INDEX 165
Gide, André, 100 MacGowan, Christopher, 13, 14, 89,

Ginsberg, Allen, 48–50, 149 151 n. 1
Glicentstein, Enrico, 20, 98, 100, 110, Malina, Judith, 14, 25
112, 154 n. 14 Mariani, Paul, 14, 20, 31, 51, 52, 54, 57,
Goldberg, Mike, 46, 76–77, 151 n. 5 60, 95, 102, 103, 122, 152 n. 6
Gooch, Brad, 27, 28, 30, 66, 79, 106, Matisse, Henri, 27, 59, 64, 99, 148
152 nn. 3 and 6 Matta, Roberto, 61, 105
Goodman, Nelson, 17, 18, McClure, Michael, 49
Gorky, Arshile, 121 McCullers, Carson, 100
Graham, John, 121 McDarrah, Fred, 25–26
Greenberg, Clement, 96 McDowell, David, 103
Gris, Juan, 148 Melville, Herman, 60, 96
Guest, Barbara, 15, 77 Michaux, Henri, 113
Mitchell, Joan, 17, 25
Halpert, Edith, 93 Mitchell, W. J. T., 17–18
Hamilton, Alexander, 126 Modigliani, Amedeo, 146
Hartigan, Grace, 38, 40, 106 Monroe, Marilyn, 106, 123
Hartley, Marsden, 25, 69–70, 105 Montgomery, George, 35
Hartpence, Alanson, 135 Motherwell, Robert, 16, 17, 19, 20, 50,
Harvard University, 30, 57, 61, 65, 68 52, 53, 59–66, 79, 89, 98, 105–6, 117,
Hoffman, Hans, 89, 135 118, 123, 146, 148, 152 n. 2, 153–54 n.
Holiday, Billie, 86 3; At Five in the Afternoon, 64; The Lit-
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 60 tle Spanish Prison, 64; ‘‘The New York
School,’’ 64; Pancho Villa Dead and
Alive, 64; ‘‘The Rise and Continuity of
James, Henry, 58, 61, 128 Abstract Art,’’ 65; ‘‘What Abstract Art
James, William, 69 Means to Me,’’ 65
Johanson, Patricia, 125–26 Munch, Edvard, 104
Johns, Jasper, 44, 46, 149; In Memory of Museum of Modern Art, 15, 19, 27, 28,
My Feelings—Frank O’Hara (1961), 65, 99, 122
149; Memory Piece (Frank O’Hara), Mussolini, Benito, 100
1961–1970, 149
Jones, LeRoi, 46, 48, 149 Namuth, Hans, 75–76
Joyce, James, 30, 60, 78, 123, 149, 152 n. Neu, Renée, 27
6 New American Poetry, The, 47–49
New York City, 16, 20, 21, 25–26, 34, 41,
Kandinsky, Wassily, 25, 29, 148 47, 49, 51, 61, 62, 72–75, 93, 98, 111,
Klee, Paul, 148, 118, 119, 121–23, 146
Kline, Franz, 17, 27, 74–75, 93, 98 New York School, 16, 19, 25, 47, 60, 64,
Koch, Kenneth, 48, 49, 74, 78, 79, 106 98, 114, 117, 118, 120, 145, 149
Krasner, Lee, 102, 135 New York Times, 99, 100–101, 154 n. 15
Newman, Barnett, 69
Niese, Henry, 93–94, 107
Lambert, Catholina, 141, 155 n. 8
Lang, Violet, 74 O’Hara, Frank, 13, 14, 20, 25, 29, 49,
Levertov, Denise, 48–49, 94 101, 118, 120, 122, 145, 146, 148, 150;
Living Theatre, the, 14, 25 friendship withMotherwell, 65–66; in-
Lowell, Robert, 14 terest in Pollock’s painting, 74–79, 82–
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166 INDEX
84, 96–97; interview with Smith, 122, 122, 128, 134–36, 144, 146, 148, 152
128–29; purchase of Williams’s nn. 3, 5, 6, and 7, 153 nn. 9 and 10,
poetry, 30; references to Williams’s 154 nn. 3 and 8; Blue Poles, 96; Conver-
poetry, 40–47, 130–33; visit to Bolton gence: Number 10, 1952,90; The Deep,
Landing, 122–23, 125, 127; Williams’s 60, 96; Full Fathom Five, 78, 88; Num-
influence on, 31–40; work at MoMA, ber 1, 1948, 83–84, 153 n. 9; Number
19, 27–28, 65, 99, 122. 27, 1951, 102; Number 28, 1951, 90,
———. Writings of: ‘‘Autobiographia 102; (Scent), 96; Summertime, Number
Literaria,’’ 31–32; ‘‘Biotherm (For Bill 9A, 1948, 76, 78
Berkson),’’129–33; ‘‘Christmas Card Pop Art, 149
to Grace Hartigan,’’ 38–40; ‘‘David Porter, 74, 152 n. 2
Smith,’’ 122, 123, 130, 138; ‘‘David Pound, Ezra, 45–46, 48, 49, 103, 155 n. 6
Smith: The Color of Steel’’ 125, 127;
‘‘The Day Lady Died,’’ 85–86, 151 n. Rasmussen, Waldo, 28, 44, 96
5; ‘‘Digression on ‘Number 1,’ 1948,’’ Rechy, John, 82
82–84, 153 n. 10; ‘‘The Grand Manner Renoir, Jean, 103
of Motherwell,’’ 65–66; ‘‘Heroic Reverdy, Pierre, 46
Sculpture,’’ 44; ‘‘Jackson Pollock,’’ 78, Rimbaud, Arthur, 149
83–84, 95, 96; Kenneth Koch, a tragedy, Rivers, Larry, 25, 44, 46, 66, 74–75, 105,
74–75, 79, 149; ‘‘Meditations in an 106, 149
Emergency,’’ 129; ‘‘Memorial Day, Rodin, Auguste, 100
1950,’’ 32–34, 142, 143; ‘‘Mozart Romano, Emanuel, 20, 98–104, 107–17,
Chemisier,’’ 122–25, 127; ‘‘Ode on 118, 146, 147, 153 n. 3, 154 nn. 4, 8, 9,
Causality,’’ 96–97; ‘‘On Rachmani- 13, 14, and 15; Abstract Forms, 1951,
noff’s Birthday,’’ 76–78; ‘‘Oranges: 12 113; Abstraction, 1956, 113; Commu-
Pastorals,’’ 77; ‘‘Personism: A Mani- nion of the Isolated, 1960, 115; Portrait
festo’’ 14, 15, 36, 44, 131; ‘‘Poem Read of William Carlos Williams (1951),
at Joan Mitchell’s’’ 42–43, 129; ‘‘Rob- 101–2; Resurrection, 116; Self Portrait,
ert Motherwell’’ 65; Second Avenue, 1934, 110, 113; Self-Portrait, 1956,
105–6; ‘‘Statement for Paterson Soci- 113–14
ety,’’ 17; ‘‘A Step Away from Them,’’ Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 100
75–76, 94; ‘‘To a Poet,’’ 43; ‘‘Today,’’
Rosenberg, Harold, 52, 63, 66–70, 79,
37–38; ‘‘A Walk on Sunday After-
80–81, 95, 152 n. 3; ‘‘The American
noon,’’ 34–35; ‘‘What Sledgehammer?
Action Painters,’’ 66–67, 80–81;
Or W. C. Williams’s Been Attacked!’’
Trance Above the Streets, 67–68
40–42; ‘‘Why I am not a Painter,’’ 76–
Russia, 70
77, 82, 151 n. 5
Rutherford, NJ, 14, 19, 26, 93, 102, 110–
Olson, Charles, 48, 49, 106, 149
12, 115
Oppenheimer, Joel, 46
Perloff, Marjorie, 15, 25, 30, 31, 33, 41, Schubert, David, 46
43, 44, 65, 106 Schuyler, James, 27, 48
Picasso, Pablo, 32, 34, 83, 102, 148 Shahn, Ben, 93
Pious XI (pope), 100 Shakespeare, William, 57, 78, 134,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 67 Sheeler, Charles, 25, 92–93, 153 n. 14
Pollock, Jackson, 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, 33, Sholod, Charlotte Snyder, 100, 154 n. 14
50, 60, 68, 69, 72–79, 82–84, 87–102, Smith, David, 17, 19, 20, 25, 27, 50, 68,
104, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 90, 98, 118–23, 125–30, 132–34, 136–
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INDEX 167
45, 146, 154 n. 1, 155 n. 2 and 3; Agri- ———. Writings of: ‘‘Against the
cola IX, 1952, 138–40, Agricola XII, Weather,’’ 88; ‘‘The American Spirit
138; Australia, 127; Cubi X, 1963, in Art,’’ 16, 19, 52, 54–60, 63–64, 70–
126–27; Cubi XIX, 1964, 126; Cubi 71, 98, 104, 105, 108, 135, 150; ‘‘The
XXI, 1964, 127; Sentinel III (1957), Art,’’ 146; ‘‘Asphodel, that Greeny
144; Voltri VI, 1962, 144; Voltri VII, Flower,’’ 13, 47, 56; Autobiography, 26–
1962, 144; Wagon II, 144–45; Zig IV, 27, 46, 105, 134, 135, 154 n. 10; ‘‘Bran-
1961, 129–30 cusi,’’ 122; ‘‘The Broken Vase,’’ 98, 99,
Snyder, Gary, 49 112–17; ‘‘Burning the Christmas
Springsteen, Bruce, 14 Greens,’’ 38–40; ‘‘Catastrophic
Stein, Gertrude, 102, 149 Birth,’’ 63; ‘‘The Catholic Bells,’’ 31;
Stevens, Wallace, 28, 43, 51, 60, 62, 65, ‘‘The Cod Head,’’ 152; ‘‘Complaint,’’
155 n. 6 26, ‘‘The Desert Music’’ 48, 95; The
Stieglitz, Alfred, 51, 55, 105 Embodiment of Knowledge, 62, 91, 119;
Still, Clifford, 69 ‘‘The Farmer,’’ 138–40; The Great
Surrealism, 60, 61, 62, 64, 105, 152, n. 7 American Novel, 13, 29, 32, 134, 141; In
the American Grain, 67, 141; ‘‘January
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri, 147 Morning: Suite,’’ 84–87; ‘‘Jersey
Toynbee, Arnold, 59, 109–110 Lyric,’’ 94; Journey to Love, 47, 48, 131;
Kora in Hell, 36, 37, 44, 49, 86, 106,
Unicorn Tapestries, 91, 105, 147, 153 n. 120; ‘‘The Last Words of my English
15, Grandmother,’’ 31; Many Loves,
25–26; ‘‘The Non-Entity,’’ 88–89,
Van Gogh, Vincent, 111–12 ‘‘Pastoral (When I was younger),’’ 31–
VVV, 61, 63 32, 34, 81, 136–37; Paterson, 13, 16,
29, 41, 44–48, 90–98, 126, 130–132,
Weaver, Mike, 62, 102, 114–16, 147 141–42, 147, 153 nn. 12, 13, and 15;
Werner, Alfred, 114–15 ‘‘Paterson: Episode 17,’’ 141; Pictures
Whalen, Philip, 49 from Brueghel, 147; ‘‘A Place (Any
Whitman, Walt, 13, 38, 57, 69, 123 Place) To Transcend All Places,’’ 51;
William Carlos Williams Society, 14 ‘‘The Poem as a Field of Action,’’ 53,
Williams, Elena Hoheb (mother), 63, 87, 67, 80, 89, 92, 125; ‘‘The Portrait,’’ 20,
99 98, 102–4, 107–9, 117; ‘‘The Red
Williams, Florence Herman (Floss) Wheelbarrow’’ 13, 37, 138, 140; ‘‘Rev-
(wife), 92, 103, 109, 120, 121 elation,’’ 82; ‘‘The Right of Way,’’ 34,
Williams, Tennessee, 100 81–82; ‘‘Shadows,’’ 131–32, ‘‘A Sort of
Williams, William Carlos, 13, 25, 44, 46, a Song,’’ 38, 142; Spring and All, 13,
48, 51, 67, 72, 98, 123, 146; contact 31, 32, 51, 61, 70, 86, 133, 134, 138,
with Brancusi, 121–22; contact with 140; ‘‘View of a Lake,’’ 35; ‘‘View of a
Davis, 120–21; contact with Mother- Woman at Her Bath,’’ 77; ‘‘The Wan-
well, 60–65; correspondence about derer,’’ 43; The Wedge, 33–34, 38, 142,
O’Hara, 48–49; friendship with Ro- 143
mano, 102–3, 109–12, 116–17; influ- Wolfe, Thomas, 128
ence on O’Hara, 31–40; influence on Woolf, Virginia, 135
Rosenberg, 66–68; references to Pol- World War II, 16, 30, 152 n. 6
lock, 90–95, 113; work as physician,
16, 19, 26–28, 105, 136, 151 n. 2 Zukofsky, Louis, 14, 53
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William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and The New York Art Scene

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William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and The New York Art Scene

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William Carlos Williams,

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Associated University Presses

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

printed in the united states of america

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1. A Poet ‘‘Better Than the Movies’’ 25

2. ‘‘The American Spirit in Art’’: Williams and Abstract

3. Imaginative ‘‘Blobs of Paint’’: Jackson Pollock in the Work

4. ‘‘A Blossoming of the Spirit’’: Williams, Emanuel Romano,

5. Efﬁciency in Form: Artistry and Authenticity in the Works

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GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT IS GIVEN TO NEW DIRECTIONS PUB-

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1964 by Frank O’Hara and reprinted by permission of City Lights

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tor Merrill Maguire Skaggs. She offered steady encouragement and

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POETIC REPUTATIONS, OR ANY REPUTATIONS FOR THAT MATTER, CAN

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Williams’s lasting legacy is not only evident in the republication of

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a new collection of his Selected Poems (Knopf, 2008) edited by Mark

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angle, I also became fascinated with both men’s keen understanding

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varying appeal to avant-garde poets, as well as for appreciating a de-

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larly helpful for understanding these difﬁculties. He offers a compel-

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also examines several cultural and artistic connections between these

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By examining O’Hara’s appreciation for Williams and Williams’s

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IN HIS ESSAY ON THE SPIRITUAL IN ART, WASSILY KANDINSKY ASSERTS,

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Poetry and the Workplace

As previously mentioned, Williams and O’Hara had active profes-

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Redefining the American Poetic

At their core, both men refused to place restrictions on the things

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‘‘anti-literary and anti-artistic’’ in O’Hara’s poems (O’Hara 1995, vii).

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experience and uses it as a cornerstone of his aesthetics. As with Emer-

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Williams’s Early Influence on O’Hara

When I was a child

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ticular perspective on the world. Toward the close of the poem, he

And here I am, the

The series of exclamations accentuates a speaker reveling in his cre-

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At that time all of us began to think

The ﬁnal line evokes a Pollock-like process of discovering a painting’s

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Strikingly, O’Hara’s ‘‘belly’’ image evokes Williams’s ‘‘The Right of

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