That style is very much on display in Robert Pinsky's exemplary new edition of Williams's Selected Poems (The Library of America). Williams once noted that "free verse is a misnomer" since "all verse must be governed," and he spent much of his poetic life searching for a new governing principle and measure -- an American poetry equal to American life. He provided modern American poetry with an idiom -- the music of speech, what Marianne Moore calls "the accuracy of the vernacular." Time and again he argued that "we've got to begin by stating that we speak (here) a distinct, separate language in a present (new era) and that it is NOT English." In addition to the emancipation of American speech, he gave us a particular way of thinking by the line. He is a poet of relative -- as opposed to absolute -- order. His lineation is organic, free-flowing, controlled. He created a method of breaking lines that mirrors perception and shows the mind at work.
Emerson told the American poet to "ask the fact for the form," and Williams had an Emersonian genius for melding form and content. His search for a new line, relatively determined, was part of his search for a new subject matter. His achievement was to make his poems out of the process, the quest. It was his deep conviction that, as he put it 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.
Williams's news was that we live in a new world and need a form of poetry equal to reality.
