AMERICAN

At ten a.m. the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her
huband’s house.
I pass solitary in my car.
Then again she comes to the
curb,
to call the ice-man, fish-man,
and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I
compare her
To a fallen leaf.
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass
smiling.
He termed his work “objectivist”
to suggest the importance of concrete,
visual objects. His work often
captured the spontaneous, emotive
pattern of experience, and influenced
the “Beat” writing of the
early 1950s.
Like Eliot and Pound, Williams
tried his hand at the epic form, but
while their epics employ literary
allusions directed to a small number
of highly educated readers,
Williams instead writes for a more
general audience. Though he studied
abroad, he elected to live in the
United States. His epic, Paterson
(five vols., 1946-1958), celebrates
his hometown of Paterson, New
Jersey, as seen by an autobiographical
“Dr. Paterson.” In it, Williams
juxtaposed lyric passages, prose,
letters, autobiography, newspaper
ROBINSON JEFFERS
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accounts, and historical facts. The
layout’s ample white space suggests
the open road theme of
American literature and gives a
sense of new vistas even open to
the poor people who picnic in the
public park on Sundays. Like
Whitman’s persona in Leaves of
Grass, Dr. Paterson moves freely
among the working people:
-late spring,
a Sunday afternoon!
- and goes by the footpath to the
cliff (counting: the proof)
himself among others
- treads there the same stones
on which their feet slip as they
climb,
paced by their dogs!
laughing, calling to each other -
Wait for me!
(II, i, 14-23)
BETWEEN THE WARS
Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Numerous American poets of
stature and genuine vision
arose in the years between
the world wars, among them poets
from the West Coast, women, and
African-Americans. Like the novelist
John Steinbeck, Robinson
Jeffers lived in California and wrote
of the Spanish rancheros and Indians
and their mixed traditions,
and of the haunting beauty of the
land. Trained in the classics and
well-read in Freud, he re-created
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