“A labor revolution by a society seeking to be in fact classless”, declared the poet William Carlos Williams in 1936, “is both great and traditionally American in its appeal” (SL 115). Often presented by literary critics as a liberal with paternalistic instincts towards the working poor, Williams was in fact one of the most exuberantly left-wing poets of his generation: a socialistic chronicler of proletarian scenes and settings in his native New Jersey, where he served as a pediatrician and doctor-on-call for over forty years. “I’m a radical!”, he exclaimed in a late interview, “I write modern poetry, baby!” The time has come to reclaim the subversive legacy of this canonical American writer.
When asked about his political leanings in 1939, Williams was characteristically succinct, and inspiring, in his reply: “long live in America the memory of Eugene Debs”, he said, referring to the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate, who contested elections on the party ticket in 1904, 1908, 1912 and 1920. Famed for his passionate critiques of social inequality, Debs, who died in 1926, had been arrested for his opposition to America’s entry into the First World War, famously using the occasion of his trial to broadcast and re-affirm his political allegiances: “while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”.
Although never imprisoned for his beliefs, Williams, like Debs, was unshakably sympathetic to America’s “lower class” of workers and vagrants: people worn down by labour or excluded from literary and cultural representation. Combining observational precision with parabolic force, his poem “Proletarian Portrait” describes a “young, bareheaded woman” coming to a halt in the open street, before reaching into her shoe to remove “the nail / That has been hurting her” (CP I 384). The American masses, we can surmise, might follow a comparable trajectory: reflection leading to practical action.
Adrienne Rich once remarked that during her years as a literature student in university, the books she “read only rarely suggested that for many people it is a common, everyday fact of life to be hungry.” Williams, by contrast, rarely allowed his readers to forget it. He had an uncanny ability to look at hunger, and perceive humanity; to register the wreckage and pollution of industrial development, and yet to sense the changing seasons, the renewal of the natural world beneath the surface of modern life. His work pulses with the intuition that “To Be Hungry Is To Be Great” – his piece of that title combining ecological attentiveness with rowdy proletarian hope in its celebration of the “yellow grass-onion, / spring’s first green, precursor / to Manhattan’s pavement” (CP1 400). Even in America’s sprawling cities, the poem proposes, the Spring’s returning “green”, the onion, might be “plucked”, “washed, split and fried”, then “served hot on rye bread […] to beer a perfect appetizer.” And “the best part/ of it”, Williams concludes, “is they grow everywhere.”
In a similar vein, the poem “To a Poor Old Woman” – alongside “This Is Just to Say”, Williams’s most famous depiction of hunger (and plums) – holds against the visual evidence of the woman’s poverty the equally palpable fact of the pleasure she gains, the “solace” she draws, from “munching a plum on / the street”, transforming what might have been a portrait of destitution into an open-air spectacle of ease and unabashedness: “They taste good to her” (CP1 383). Such poems are as remarkable for their plain-spoken clarity of perception as for the subject broached – that of poverty on the street-curb, and the endurance and vitality of America’s proletarian lives.
As critic Helen Vendler has observed, Williams was “the first American poet after Whitman” to identify with “the urban poor in a language technically appropriate to the subject”, grounding his modernism in the material surroundings and gutsy rhythms of New Jersey’s industrial towns – an example that Allen Ginsberg would later emulate and build upon, in his own ground-breaking visions of the degradation and promise inherent in American modernity. “A Poem for Norman MacLeod” further distills such concerns, declaring that the “revolution” will be “accomplished” when “noble has been / changed to no bull” (CP1 401). . The piece is typical of Williams’s style, not least in the punful delight and down-to-earth perspective through which he funnels his political vision.
Williams’s mid-century epic, Paterson, may likewise be read as a complex exercise in vernacular imagining. Conscious of the decayed state of Paterson city in the late 1940s, Williams looks backwards in an attempt to fan the flames of its former radical traditions – not least as exemplified during the famous silk mill-workers’ strike of 1913. “Rose and I didn’t know each other when we both went to the Paterson strike”, reads one prose segment:
She went regularly to feed Jack Reed in jail and I listened to Big Bill Haywood, Gurley Flynn and the rest of the big hearts and helping hands in Union Hall. And look at the damned thing now. (P 99)
Williams portrays his chosen locale as a hotbed of mutual aid and civic solidarity – home to a politics that had been once, and might have been for longer, had the hopes of I.W.W. organizers “Big Bill Haywood” and Elizabeth “Gurley Flynn” been realized, and the movement of “big hearts and helping hands” they represented been allowed to flourish.
As Michael Denning summarizes, “Williams’s communism was a poet’s communism, not an organizer’s communism.” Nonetheless, as above, on many occasions throughout his life this consistently anti-fascist poet found himself positioned to the left of America’s Communist Party (CP) – an organization he never joined, even as he identified with many of its core tenets. His views, encoded into his poems and short stories, frequently chimed with socialist and anarchist critiques of that institution, even as he recognised the urgent need for what he called the “equalisation of wealth between the rich and poor” in American society (ARI 184). So in 1948, Williams could be found arguing that “there is much justice in the insistency by Communism upon a literature based upon a people’s good”, while observing, pointedly, that in “order to serve the cause of the proletariat”, the writer “must not under any circumstances debase his art to any purpose” (ARI 75). Creative freedom and personal liberty were central values, for him – leading him to distrust what he viewed as the schematism and prescriptive outlook of the party and its affiliated editorial organs. “I wasn’t a Communist”, he stated, “but I was anticapitalistic” (I 78).
Williams’s radicalism was homegrown – infused with human sympathy and camaraderie, and rooted in the specificities of life and labor as he actually encountered them. “The wealthy / I defied”, he wrote in one late poem: the wealthy and those “who take their cues from them” (CP2 321). For “the poor” of Rutherford, on the other hand, he “was deeply sympathetic and filled with admiration”: “I would have done anything for them, anything but treat them for nothing, and I guess I did that too.” (IWWP 49-50). For Williams, people came first; and so his instinct, commendably, was to resist the “neo-scholasticism” to be found in the anti-establishmentarian milieu, on both Left and Right, that attracted other poets. “No one / can understand what makes the present age / what it is”, he wrote, so long as they remain “mystified by certain / insistences” (CP I 272), a circumstance that literature (as Williams conceived of it) could rectify and dispel, demystifying the power dynamics at play in society.
When compared to the variously conservative leanings of his immediate literary contemporaries – figures such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and the fascistic Ezra Pound – Williams’s documentary poetics and demotic socialism today seem salutary and invigorating. Chronicling the social strains and personal vitalities of the New Jersey streets he knew, his writings collectively envision what might be called a democratic commons. To read them is to immerse ourselves in a vibrant space and history sustained by people themselves – where self-expression and mutual solidarity are possible, and where even in the stark metropolis, a flush of plums, the flourishing fruits of spring, may be discovered anew, giving pleasure to the poor and “solace” to the hungry. Without shirking the often brutal inequalities and exploitations of industrial modernity, Williams’s radicalism returns us to the world and to one another, lit by the simple but inspiring belief that “you can do lots / if you know / what’s around you”. No bull.