This thesis is basically a study of William Carlos Williams' Paterson, with emphasis on Book Five, the final completed book of the poem. Because Williams is repeatedly concerned with the Unicorn tapestries in Book Five, much attention is given to them, and the rest of Book Five is seen as complementary to this central metaphor. And because this metaphor is a restriction to the essentials, or what Williams calls "by multiplication a reduction to one," the thesis is largely involved in interpreting the implications of this metaphor, developed and determined by the context of the rest of the poem. Previously, most critics have either treated Paterson V as a postscript to Paterson I-IV, or have dismissed the book by stating in general terms that Williams in Book Five takes Paterson into the realm of the Imagination. In either case, a detailed analysis of Book Five has been avoided. This thesis attempts such an analysis, in order to reveal that Paterson V is not a postscript to the rest of the poem, but its culmination. Though Book Five is in a sense in a different realm from the first four books, the transition from the realm of life to that of art is not only foreshadowed by the former books, but is also the means of solution to the Paterson dilemma, struggled with and developed in Paterson I-IV, but never crystallized. This occurs in Book Five, where the Unicorn tapestries are the metaphoric "hub" of the crystallization. Though the dilemma involves both Paterson the man and city, it is mostly concerned with Paterson the poet, and his manifestation, the poem Paterson. Hence the dilemma is to a large extent autobiographical. Paterson's problem is Williams' problem: the necessity of transforming the poet's life quest, with all its implications, into a culminatory work of art. To this basic problem must be added several crucial obstacles. The first is that of approaching death. By the end of Book Four, Paterson has reached the end of his life course. Williams, in the year of Book Four's publication, has had several crippling strokes. In other words, Williams' life, like Paterson's, may soon be terminated, and thus the work of art may never be created. Secondly, Williams' work of art must include the processes of art and life, as well as their products. Without process, the product will stagnate, and without product, the process will remain a confused delirium. In this sense, Book Five becomes the product of the processes involved in Paterson I-IV, the product that clarifies both the poet's quest and his poetics, saves both Williams and Paterson from meaningless death, and gives the poet impetus to continue his craft. Intrinsic to the union of process and product is the union of life with literature, the poetic with the anti-poetic, and the Dionysian aspect of creation with that of the Apollonian. In Paterson, these turn out to be the "inter-penetrating realities" that the poet seeks to unite throughout the poem. The following analysis attempts to reveal how the union does symbolically or metaphorically occur, how the various disparate forces in the poem become embodied in a complex but harmonious whole, and why this union, as portrayed in the Unicorn tapestries, does succeed, where similar earlier attempts had failed / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis seeks to identify the philosophical arguments behind William Carlos Williams' constant attack upon accepted patterns of thought, behaviour and art. The first chapter outlines Williams' belief in the necessity of a continual process of renewal in order to prevent traditional approaches to experience from decaying individual perception into unconscious habits of preconception. The thesis then debates the possibility and value of pure perception in contrast to preconception, of objectivity in contrast to subjectivity, of the need for artistic impartiality to prevent biassed perception. This line of inquiry develops into a discussion of Williams' doctrine of change as essential to clear perception: Williams' advocation of the new, of the perception of present, local reality is a struggle against the traditional habitual concentration upon the past, the foreign and upon future abstractions. By Chapter Four, the thesis has evolved into a detailed inspection of the poetic techniques necessary for the clarifying expression of a continually renewed awareness. An attempt is made to show how poetry must change to keep reflecting a changing reality that is perceived now as a world of process rather than as a static and definable quantity. Underlying the whole thesis is the central interpretation that Williams' objection to established doctrines is a rejection of that tradition of man's egotistical aloofness from the ground and of his urge to control nature by destruction which has alienated him from his consciousness of his environment and from his source of. self-discovery. The second half of the thesis tries to reveal the poem Paterson as the assimilation of Williams' organic philosophy in a poetic form whose construction releases beauty from its abstraction in the mind into a living sentient experience. The thesis evolves towards an attempt to reveal Williams' call for man to rediscover a primal awareness of himself through an interpenetration with nature, a sympathetic appreciation of and yielding to the unopposed objects of his environment. The method of approach used is apocalyptic, rather than purely analytical. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

The thesis is, that the dance, as metaphor and as ordering function, is central to an understanding of William Carlos Williams' poetry and of his activity as poet. The first chapter, which is a ground for what follows, begins with a close examination of "The Rose" from Spring and All as a demonstration of some of Williams' basic principles concerning the act of making the poem. My emphasis is on what one can observe happening in the poem itself, the poem as enactment or dance. I then proceed to examine the prose passages from Spring and All as statement of those principles, in order to establish the meaning of some terms, imitation, engagement, imagination, as Williams uses them "both as theory in the prose descriptions and as actuality in the poems. The second chapter deals with the notion of dance as alternative to description, the action or enactment in a poem, which Williams calls imitation. I attempt to show what dance is, the metaphor of it, and how it might manifest itself in (as) language, that is to say, the energy of the poem as dance. Then, in the light of several poems included in the text of the chapter, I discuss imitation in terms of composition and invention, what Williams considers the basic activities of the poet in the making of a poem. The third chapter deals with the act of engagement as dance, to engage in an activity, making love or writing a poem. I attempt to show, by reference to several of Williams' short stories and to In the American Grain, as well as to the poems, some of the kinds of perceptions and awareness that are characteristic of this kind of engagement, and how they shape the poem; and, in the end, to come to an understanding of what Williams means by penetration. In the fourth chapter, measure as dance, I examine some of Williams' ideas and practice in the rhythm and form of the poem, to show how measure is the shape the dance assumes, and how Williams resolved some of his own difficulties concerning the problem of measure. And the chapter concludes with a restatement of, and an insistence upon, the importance of the metaphor of dance. My purpose has not been to attempt a historic analysis or evaluation of Williams as critic and theorist, or as poet – though the fact of the thesis does imply certain judgements of value, and the text of it is, to some degree, analytical -- but to demonstrate and elucidate, by making the dance a basis for my discussions, some of Williams' primary concerns as poet. My emphasis, then, has not been on the views and theories of other critics, not on chronological developments in the poems themselves, but on the facts of the dance, immediate and actual. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

by Chan Weng Kit. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-105). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter1 --- The Eyes in Paterson: Williams as Photographer and Illustrator --- p.14 / Chapter Chapter2 --- The Past and the Present: Williams as Historian in Paterson --- p.37 / Chapter Chapter3 --- "The Father, the Mother and the Son: the Making of the Paterson Family" --- p.60 / Conclusion --- p.92 / Works Cited --- p.101

The following three chapters identify influences of the Imagist movement and the avant garde painters on the early poetry of Williams, and particularly on those poems that deal with flowers. This study is restricted to the earlier poems for several reasons, the most obvious being that Williams simply does not employ floral imagery to any extent in The Collected Later Poems. For instance, of the almost three hundred poems in The Collected Earlier Poems nearly sixty take flowers as their title or rely on floral imagery for part of their power. Nearly half that many use arboreal imagery, another prominent and important "object" in Williams' poetry, and, of course, many more use other images from the natural world. On the other hand, in The Collected Later Poems only three poems have flowers in their titles. Even in these three Williams was more interested in depicting sociological situations than in description, for his conception of poetry changed radically after the 1930's. He became convinced at that time that poetry should be serious rather than entertaining. Further, he became a staunch advocate of the "anti-poetic" theory of beauty whose chief tenet was that beauty and ugliness were part of a single whole. Nothing beautiful, like a flower, could exist without its soil of ugly, drab antecedents. James Guimond believes that this is the reason why Williams ceased presenting "his beautiful objects in splendid, static isolation from time and the world around them" (1, p. 50). Possibly 14 for these reasons the nature imagery is not nearly so dominant in these poems as in those written before 1940. Nor has the poetry of Paterson or Pictures from Breugel been included in this study. Because of the tremendous attention given them in the last five years, their nature imagery has been well covered. However, of the nature, and especially floral, imagery of the earlier poetry little has been said. Hopefully, this study will show that Williams made extensive and successful use of flowers in his poetry because they were the particular objects of the concrete world which best lent themselves to the related techniques and goals of first the Imagistic movement in poetry and later the Stieglitz school in painting.

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