1.

Returning to Rutherford, New Jersey, aboard the S.S. Pennland in September, 1927, William Carlos Williams wrote a series of letters to his wife, Floss, who had stayed in Europe with the two boys. In those letters, Williams discussed how he anticipated returning to work and how he hoped to develop five or six new writing projects. He acknowledged a risk to their marriage in separating, but felt that they were right to do so, even obliged as parents to break “that staleness of schooling” in Rutherford by putting the two boys in a European school for a year. He mentioned that “We have ended a period as you say and now we are going on.”¹ And on Tuesday, the third day at sea, he wrote to her,

Yesterday I finished my philosophy. The last chapters are easy and very fine. They deal with art and manners. If you ever get hold of the book, Science and the Modern World (Whitehead) you should read the final chapters.

(SL 79)

As Mike Weaver notes, John Riordan had given Williams a copy of Whitehead's book the previous December (1926). Williams' copy is inscribed as follows:

Finished reading it at sea, Sept. 26, 1927—A milestone surely in my career, should I have the force & imagination to go on with my work.

(Weaver 48)

Use of the verb “should,” here, seems to indicate an obstacle to be overcome in Williams' projected career. It would appear, then, more than a coincidence that the day after he finished reading Whitehead's book, “9/27,” Williams began a sequence of poems that resulted in The Descent of Winter. In fact, he began a journal while on board the Pennland that he continued until at least July 19, 1928. From that journal, he derived both The Descent of Winter and the series of poems entitled “Della Primavera Trasportata al Morale”; they were once conceived of as a single book (Baldwin and Meyers 186-9).

Williams did go on to develop several new writing projects. In addition to the two already mentioned, he began White Mule, translated Philippe Soupault's Last Nights in Paris and, during the influenza epidemic of 1929, wrote January: A Novelette. He also began The Embodiment of Knowledge, a manuscript he worked on for the following two years. The first dated entry is June 23rd, 1928, when he was still working in that previous journal; the last dated entry is August 30, 1930. Paul Mariani, Williams' biographer, writes that The Embodiment of Knowledge is, “in a sense,” an extension of that first journal (802-3, n. 139). As regards Williams' poetic, there is a significant correlation between the ideas expressed by Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, and much of the argument that Williams makes there for the “embodiment of knowledge” and a “new order of knowing” (EK 63, 81).

The Embodiment of Knowledge was published posthumously from a manuscript Williams left to the Beinecke Library at Yale. The manuscript, fifty short chapters, is largely unrevised, although left in typescript (EK xxii). Williams sent the text to Kenneth Burke in 1932, but Burke declined to publish it and thought it derivative of Dewey, a charge, incidentally, which Williams denied (SL 138). Williams offered the manuscript to Ronald Lane Latimer in 1935, but Latimer was not interested in publishing prose (Mariani 336, 368). Williams then apparently dropped plans to publish and, consequently, stopped work on the book, although he clearly intended to revise it further (EK 1, SL 137-8). Williams had developed an arrangement for the chapters (which the editor, Ron Loewinsohn, has followed), but nonetheless, The Embodiment of Knowledge is a difficult book to read, for while it has themes, it is not organized thematically, nor is the development clear. What follows is a reconstructed argument, for the purpose of demonstrating the importance of this book as a statement of Williams' poetic and for the purpose of showing the relationship of that poetic to Williams' reading of Whitehead's Science and the Modern World.

The final chapters of Whitehead's book, which Williams referred to in his letter, are titled “God,” “Religion and Science” and “Requisites for Social Progress.” Because he mentions that those were “easy,” one supposes difficulties with prior chapters. If so, the difficult chapters were likely to have been those on relativity, quantum physics, and abstraction, which precede the later ones. Williams had been discussing relativity and quantum physics with John Riordan in the previous year (Weaver 45-50). What Williams did not say in that letter, but to the point, is that Whitehead's book argues for a radical change in Western education, an argument that culminates in the final, relatively “easy” chapters. The need for such a radical change is also a major premise of The Embodiment of Knowledge. Whitehead attacks existing Western educational concepts, largely derived from doctrines of scientific materialism, as no longer tenable, proposing that half of the child's curriculum be devoted to aesthetic experience, which in Whitehead's terms is an exposure to varieties of value. Williams argues against those same current educational concepts, based, he believes, on science and philosophy. And in turn, Williams proposes the use of modern poems as educational texts in our schools, because poetry would provide the student with a proper attitude towards knowledge. By exposing students to the aesthetic experience of (explicitly) modern poetry, they would learn both the value and the use of knowledge.

This is not to say that Williams simply derived the ideas of The Embodiment of Knowledge from Whitehead; many of the ideas are already implicit in Spring and All and In the American Grain, which antedate Williams' reading of Whitehead (for instance, CP1 224-5). Nor can Whitehead be said to have influenced Williams in any profound sense. For instance, The Descent of Winter, written just after Williams read Whitehead, shows no explicit evidence of Whitehead's influence. And as may be obvious, Whitehead is a philosopher, explaining highly abstract scientific concepts, while Williams states that a central theme of The Embodiment of Knowledge is that “science is a lie” and “philosophy a sham” (EK 86). But it is also obvious that Williams is not attacking Whitehead there; indeed, he never mentions Whitehead in the book. Rather, Williams is writing from a position that Whitehead shares, a point made obvious by the manner in which Williams argues and the way he at times borrows from Whitehead. Further, Whitehead confirmed several propositions fundamental to Williams' poetic, most conspicuously in regards to locale or “place.” The relationship between Williams and Whitehead, then, is best conceived as one of extension: Whitehead's book helped Williams to extend several of the key arguments he wished to make for an “embodiment of knowledge.” Reading The Embodiment of Knowledge collaterally with Science and the Modern World, a “milestone” in his career, further clarifies Williams' attack on the scientific and epistemological basis of current educational practices.

In sum, Williams developed a fairly complete aesthetic position in The Embodiment of Knowledge, one he had been working towards for several years. The tacit parallels with Whitehead help amplify this position, as do passages from January: A Novelette, which Williams wrote in 1929. At this point in his career, Williams began to argue that poetry is a means of knowing equal to science and philosophy. Its value as knowledge consists of an “intense vision of the facts,” a vision made actual in the act of writing. The purpose of an art, as distinguished from its significance as art, is to achieve clarity. The purpose of education, Williams argues, is to achieve that same clarity. His two terms, vision and clarity, bear an obvious relationship as visual terms serving analogously for mental events. But there is as well a visionary aspect to Williams' concept of clarity and to his belief that poetry is a form of knowledge, both of which are made explicit in The Embodiment of Knowledge.

2.

Simply put, Whitehead's book arose from his 1925 Lowell Lectures and is based largely on the observation that scientific thought in the 20th Century is “too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis” (SMW 66). The chapters proceed by century, from 1600 to the present, to explain and to explore problems in the foundation and development of science. Most chapters make special reference to various doctrines of scientific materialism that have evolved since the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s. Such doctrines were once crucial, Whitehead writes, but now have been undermined by 19th Century advances in instrumental design. Those instruments produce facts that contradict traditional mechanistic theory. While narrating this history, Whitehead introduces his own “alternative doctrine of an organic theory of nature” (SMW 113-14). As his argument for that theory culminates, Whitehead further argues that Western educational practices, based on scientific materialism, require the same changes that scientific theory must undergo.

That organic theory of nature need not be treated in detail here. But there is one argument, from the chapter entitled “The Eighteenth Century,” especially relevant to Williams' book, and it can be briefly paraphrased. With the exception of one term, “prehension,” most of Whitehead's key words are straightforward. They are: unity, event, aspect, location, fact and value. The word “prehension” means “to grasp together.” As Whitehead explains, he uses “prehension for uncognitive apprehension,” in order to avoid introducing cognition as necessary to the apprehension of unity (SMW 69). Whitehead's discussion centers upon the fallacy of assuming that any bit of matter has a simple location which can be adequately expressed “in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and other durations of time” (SMW 58). The fallacy emerges from an assumption that the universe is composed of a “material” without inherent value, whose chief characteristic is its simple location (SMW 49). Whitehead argues that one can't speak, adequately, of a particular object in terms of simple spatio-temporal relations, saying that it is here in time and here in space. An object can only be located, in space and time, by essential reference to other locations in space and other durations in time. These other locations and durations are aspects of that object, and as such they are essential to the existence of that particular object.

Whitehead argues, alternately, that to discuss the problem of location, one must begin with an analysis of space and time (or space-time). There are three “characters” in the status of space-time: (1) the separative, since things are separated by space and time; (2) the prehensive, since things are unified in space and in time; and (3) the modal, since things have specific shape and certain endurance (or limitation) in space-time. Using the simplified example of a volume in space, Whitehead explains that the separative character of this volume is that it can be broken down or analyzed into subvolumes, indefinitely. But the second character, the prehensive, is the “prime fact” of a volume. The volume is not merely the aggregate of subdivided parts; it is an ordered aggregate, having unity. The third, modal characteristic of an object is what gives rise to the concept of simple location. But that very specificity, Whitehead argues, can only be understood by essential reference to other objects. Thus, any volume in space can only be explained in terms of other volumes; it lies in relation. Given volume A, A's relationship to other volumes B, C, and D are aspects of A. The essence of A is its prehensive unity. But that unity is composed of the aspects A has, or prehends, from B, C, and D. What makes A unique is A's relationship to other volumes. Said another way, the essence that is A is A's relationship to all other volumes, which, by being A, A brings into unity. That essence can only be known by reference to those other volumes, for there is nothing absolute about volume A. To abstract volume A from this context of other volumes is to destroy the very essence of A. Following Leibniz, Whitehead explains that “every volume mirrors in itself every other volume in space” (SMW 64-5).

The circular nature of an attempt to define the essence of A by its aspects or relationships to B, C, D, all of which are in turn defined by each other, is caused, Whitehead explains, by an abstraction from immediate, concrete facts. Even space-time is not a self-subsistent entity and requires reference to the concrete facts (SMW 65-6). Obviously, this expression of A originates from the relation that the perceiver has to the perceived volume A, and that introduces a second necessary location.² In addition, both locations have reference to other durations in time and other regions in space in a continuous, interlocked series. The problem with taking either term or abstraction, the perceiver (subject) or the perceived (object), as independent or absolute is that, in doing so, one ignores the obvious fact that both “events” occur within a larger event, which unites them. Traditional analytic thought divides and subdivides the unity of one event—water, molecule, atom, electron—in order to find a ground by which to explain experience. This assumes that the universe is mechanistic, held together by absolute “laws,” and it ignores the process by which each of those subdivided unities is organized into ever-greater unities, of which we are but an aspect. As Whitehead explains, the abstractions of science merely explore the aspects of an event, and ignore the emergent unity. After all, Whitehead writes, “An electron for us is merely the pattern of its aspects in its environment, so far as those aspects are relevant to the electro-magnetic field” (SMW 132).

The “object” of knowledge, then (and this is my interpretation), is not only to understand these patterns as aspects of our relationship with the world, but to recognize that our relationships exist within a dynamic process. Knowledge is relative. That process is “the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes.” That is what composes the world we know, “a manifold of prehensions” (SMW 70-1).

Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualisation of the substrate activity. But individualisation does not mean substantial independence.

(SMW 70)

Whitehead calls this theory “provisional Realism.” We do indeed provide unity to the experiences through which we realize ourselves, but what we provide with unity is inextricably bound to unities entirely outside ourselves, beyond us, if you will. What unity the mind apprehends is only an aspect of what that larger unifying force, the “substrate activity,” is creating. We are within that process. It is a fallacy to suppose we are external to or can transcend the world. As Whitehead remarks, “the world, as known, transcends the subject which is cognisant of it” (SMW 90).

3.

Of course, one only guesses what effect this argument had on Williams, but the potential repercussions are profound, as one suspects he was aware. Williams had, in fact, worked out similar positions on the problem of abstraction, on the integrity of specific events (and alternately on the integrity of experience), but most importantly, on the dynamic relation between the perceiver and the perceived. Neither Whitehead nor Williams, it should be pointed out, conceived of that relationship in dualistic terms. Williams spoke of the dynamic, in In the American Grain, as the relation between thought and place. As regards the confirmation and extension Whitehead's ideas offered, the argument against simple location provided Williams with a systematic account of the universality of place, a universality context bound and only approached in concrete, immediate terms. Indeed, Whitehead gave an account of value, direct perception and artistic innovation very close to Williams' own account in Spring and All (see SMW 198-200). But for the moment, as pertains to Williams, two immediate observations follow. The first establishes the body, not the mind, as the prime fact of cognition, a point emphasized by Williams' phrase, “the embodiment of knowledge.” As Whitehead remarks, “the body is the organism whose states regulate our cognisance of the world. The unity of the perceptual field therefore must be a unity of bodily experience” (SMW 91). The emphasis, for both Whitehead and Williams, is on irreducible concrete facts and on immediate, common sense experience, as opposed to the proliferation of abstractions as explanatory devices. “[T]he intolerant use of abstractions,” Whitehead writes, “is the major vice of the intellect.” One cure for that vice is “dispassionate observation by means of the bodily senses” (SMW 18). Williams had similar advice in The Embodiment of Knowledge:

First rely on the direct observation of the senses, of such strength everything else is built up, without it nothing is reliable. Judge by the eyes and ears, touch and taste—reject everything from no matter what source that is without a place there.

(EK 135)

Williams is, of course, more severe than Whitehead on the subject of abstractions. Consider, for example, Williams' “Tentative Statement” in the Little Review (12.2, 95) in May, 1929:

In fact, I think it will be soon proven that there are no general and generally applicable abstract ideas universally true; that this is a philosophic and artistic falsehood, everything of value belonging to some place and retaining always its value of that place.

The second, important factor to emerge from Whitehead's argument is that the “ingredients” of cognitive activity are not simply self-referential, each in turn defined by the other, and they are not solely referential to the “subjective” event of consciousness. Rather, the ingredients of cognition “are aspects of what lies beyond that event.” We know ourselves as a complex unifying process composed of aspects of the world. Or as Whitehead writes, “Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves” (SMW 150-51). Because Whitehead does not posit consciousness as an independent substance, a dichotomy between subject and object does not arise here. Both subject and object share what Whitehead calls “a common world” (SMW 88-9). The traditional approach, as far back as Aristotle, is to assume consciousness as a requisite to knowledge and, consequently, to assume consciousness as an event prior to knowing. Whitehead has reversed this, insisting that cognition discloses events with “prehensive” unity, a unity independent of cognition, from which consciousness emerges. “Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe” (SMW 151). If “knowing,” as Jerome Bruner and others argue, is more accurately considered a process, rather than a product, that process in Whitehead's terms is prior to consciousness (Bruner 72).

Although Williams does not explicitly use Whitehead's argument for the priority of knowledge to consciousness in The Embodiment of Knowledge, Whitehead's thesis bears an obvious relationship to Williams' assertion that knowledge is located outside the mind and that both knowledge and place are anterior to understanding (EK 132). That is, given the extension Whitehead provided Williams, one can sometimes read through elliptical passages of The Embodiment of Knowledge to Science and the Modern World. And there are intersections as well, for instance between Whitehead's and Williams' use of the term “actual” or “actuality,” most obviously in January: A Novelette. Further, Whitehead's argument is easily transposed into aesthetic terms. One can speak of aesthetic experience, derived from the emergent unity of an occasion, as an objective, “actual” experience of value. Whitehead faults any scientific doctrine which assumes matter to be, in and of itself, without value and any doctrine of mind which assumes consciousness to be an independent substance, privatizing experience (SMW 195-6). Whitehead argues not only that any event has intrinsic value, but that all events establish aesthetic relationships on the basis of being actual, realized aspects of the emergent whole. Williams makes extensive use of this argument, in a conspicuously Whiteheadian way, in terms of the relation between the parts and the whole and in terms of how each part, as a member of what Whitehead calls a “community” (SMW 152), partakes of the whole.

Although Williams doubted that abstractions were universally valid, he did give knowledge an objective status and a potential for universal application. As was mentioned, Williams locates knowledge outside the mind, as part of a common world, and speaks of both knowledge and place as anterior to consciousness. But rather than attempt to define what knowledge is, Williams was primarily concerned with how knowledge is used. The problems to which he addressed himself were largely procedural. The acquisition and the application of knowledge, as the material of thought, can have an inhuman phase, for Williams, as a result of a misconception either of what knowledge is or of the purpose to which knowledge is applied. Williams attacks both science and philosophy on these two counts. As the material of thought, knowledge must be considered commonly accessible and of value primarily because it liberates the mind. But knowledge is not something gained sheerly through an accumulative process, as our educational concepts, based on scientific materialism, would seem to imply. Indeed, Williams' main charge is that we've made fetishes of science and philosophy because we conceive of knowledge as an accumulative process by which to reach an absolute. This “progressive” model, Williams believed, leads to remote specializations, to an unbalanced emphasis on analysis and abstraction, and ultimately to the divorce of the knower from the known. In contrast, Williams argues that knowledge cannot be restricted solely to the domain of scholarship, but is rather the common “property” of humanity. Thus, special claims to knowledge by academicians are without basis. Or as Williams writes,

It is knowledge itself as a material with which I have to do. To acquire it is the sole object of science and philosophy. To study knowledge as a fact established and to criticize the studied attitude toward it. With a view to showing misconceptions which render it un-human—and to that very extent false—is the object of my work.

(EK 83)

There is another, important dimension to Williams' concept of knowledge as separate from mankind (EK 62), one which involves his concept of place. For although Williams argued that knowledge can't be restricted to a single discipline, such as science, which he refers to as a category of thought, knowledge does require a context or place of origin. As well, everyone speaks in a particular context, an immediate situation to which he or she has a physical relationship. And so if the body, rather than the mind, provides organization to the perceptual field, what the body unifies, as a perceptual field, is that specific location. Importantly then, immediate experience can't be restricted to something “inside your head.” That experience is both “in here” and “out there,” arising from the relationship the perceiver has to the perceptual field. What is needed, Williams argued, is a new relationship to knowledge (EK 63), which in turn is a relationship to place. Although Williams published Paterson six months prior to finishing Whitehead's book, this rationale provides, explicitly in terms of immediate location, an important dimension to Williams' line “no ideas but in things,” or the alternate, “no ideas beside the facts” (CP1 263, 266). That line can be related to the Imagist tenet that the natural object is “the adequate symbol,” in Pound's phrase (Pound 5), and more obviously to Williams' insistence on writing from immediate contact with one's locale. But it bears emphasizing that the relationship established, between the ideas of Paterson, “that great philosopher,” and the world at large is always expressed in terms of his immediate physical location, for this is not Imagism, nor is it anti-intellectual. Williams' phrasing is not simply “no ideas,” but rather no ideas that can't be expressed in terms of his specific location. Williams insisted, repeatedly, on an essential relationship between the perceived and perceiver. Paterson's “whole concept” is expressed only in terms of the facts which comprise his experience of the world, facts which are local.

Williams had articulated a relationship between the perceived, external world and the interior world of the perceiver as early as “The Wanderer” in 1914:

Waken! O people, to the boughs green
With unripe fruit within you!
Waken to the myriad cinquefoil
in the waving grass of your minds!

(CP1 32)

This relationship has the character of a mirroring effect, the outside is within and vice versa, but more importantly each involves the other; there is an identity, an “interpenetration, both ways,” as Williams wrote in Paterson (12), and these same concepts play an important role in the composition of Paterson. In Paterson, as in “The Wanderer,” there is a need to articulate or to realize this relationship, to make it known, if you will. The opening proposition of Paterson is that one can attain a rigor of the beauty locked inside the mind by making the particular details of one's life “speak,” a theme also central to Book II:

Outside
outside myself
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          there is a world,
he rumbled, subject to my incursions
—a world
(to me) at rest,
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          which I approach
concretely—

(P 57)

These particulars precede the universal for Williams, and in his aesthetic the individual strives towards universal expression; hence the importance of Whitehead's argument for the “universality” of place. By establishing a relationship or design, in the poem, between the perceiving consciousness and those local details an aesthetic inversion occurs. What lies outside the mind becomes expressive of “his most intimate convictions” (P 8). But the connection between the perceiver and the perceived can be realized in any location and with any details:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Paterson,
Keep your pecker up
whatever the detail!
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Anywhere is everywhere

(P 273)

And Williams may well have had Whitehead specifically in mind in this passage, for as Whitehead wrote, in Science and the Modern World,

In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life. … In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

(SMW 91)

The immediate, physical facts of Williams' life are consistently used as a generative basis for Paterson, because those details, “if imaginatively conceived” (P 8), are realized aspects of the interpenetration or identity between man and city. As such, they are the means of achieving that rigor of beauty, when brought into an aesthetic design, or as Williams phrased it in Paterson: “by multiplication a reduction to one” (P 10).

This process of aesthetic realization is deliberately generated, by Williams, as a way to “unlock” the mind. Although that implies a problem of access, even a Cartesian split or cognitive distance between self and world, through which mirrored aspects emerge, the poetic being charted here is not simply one of “presentation,” what is often called a poetry of enactment (Gee 395, Miller 352). Nor should adaptation of the word “mirror” imply that Williams was trying either to copy nature or to render an experience of nature, for it's not the mirror which is of importance, but the light transmitted. The poetic being charted involves an apprehension in present tense of the interpenetration between self and world, and is based on concepts of relativity, with the Heisenberg principle writ large. Williams deliberately wrote poems from within immediate experience, rather than from a retrospective distance. One cannot speak, as Heisenberg, wrote, of nature “in itself,” but only of our relationships with nature. What emerges in the distance between the perceiver and the perceived is one's “involvement” with the world. As Williams wrote in Paterson, “we know nothing, pure / and simple, beyond / our own complexities” (P 11-2; see also EK 128). For there is no outside or absolute location from which to comment on experience. Rather than being a re-enactment of experience, Williams' poetry is a mode of experience, where the method and the object, again to paraphrase Heisenberg, are inextricably bound (Heisenberg 28-9). One cannot separate the means from the end achieved. As an issue of reference and, ultimately, of poetic methodology, if Williams' poetry is conceived of as a form of knowledge, the methodology of that poetry manifests itself as the poetic design.

Another interesting parallel, although speculative, exists between what Whitehead called “process,” “the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts” (SMW 87-8), and the way Williams spoke, in Spring and All, of the imagination. For Whitehead, “The analysis of reality indicates the two factors, activity emerging into individualised aesthetic value” (SMW 199). One knows that activity largely through aesthetic intuition. Both Williams and Whitehead spoke of value in aesthetic terms and of achieving value through art. In aesthetic terms, a work of art necessarily involves reference to factual experience, for it is composed of “aspects of what lies beyond that event” (SMW 150). But that artifact, as an aesthetic event, cannot be addressed solely by reference to that factual experience; it is an event in and of itself. Nor can it be addressed solely in terms of the aesthetic structure of that artistic event, even though Williams insisted repeatedly on the importance of poetic structure. The aesthetic structure of an artistic event and the experiential basis of that event, the form and content, both require “essential” reference to a larger event, what Whitehead would call a “substrate activity,” in which the artist participates. For a work of art is a “concretisation,” to use Whitehead's term, of a process in which form and content, as well as perceiver and perceived, are but aspects of something larger. That is to say, as well, that all aspects of an aesthetic experience are brought into prehensive aesthetic unity by an event as factual as any of the aspects or events of which it is composed.³ And Williams' emphasis on poetic design did, in fact, require a larger event, namely the imagination, by which to explain how those poetic designs emerged. When Williams talked of poetic design as a crystallization, in Spring and All, it was the force of the imagination that galvanized experience into an aesthetic event, giving experience both unity and value (CP1 206-7, 219-20, 224-6). The imagination, as an organizing activity, is both a transpersonal mode and an agency, for Williams, in which the individual engages to achieve value. An aesthetic event is an imaginary event, but in the most profound sense, one in which the imagination manifests itself as an event, disclosing the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived. As Williams said, in The Embodiment of Knowledge, when talking of Shakespeare, it is “the deed of speeches in which man is most real” for “the reality of man is an imaginative speech” (EK 12). Man is “most real” in speech, not deeds; the reality of man is achieved through the imagination.

A good illustration of this organizing activity, “fusing ingredients into a unity” (SMW 155), is provided by “The Flower,” a poem Williams wrote in January, 1929, and published in 1930 (Mariani 279-80). Although too long for detailed comment, the opening stanzas readily show how Williams layers perceptual events, aspects of B, C, and D from location A, into a composition. He has as well incorporated that layering activity as part of the content of the poem. As Whitehead had urged, these aspects are granted objective status, even though brought into unity as the emergent poem:

A petal, colorless and without form
the oblong towers lie
beyond the low hill and northward the great
bridge stanchions,
small in the distance, have appeared,
pinkish and incomplete—
It is the city,
approaching over the river. Nothing
of it is mine, but visibly
for all that it is petal of a flower—my own.
It is a flower through which the wind
combs the whitened grass and a black dog
with yellow legs stands eating from a
garbage barrel.

The oblong towers, seen as a petal “without form,” and the bridge stanchions, “incomplete,” emerge at sunrise as the city approaches in view and, coincidentally, as the poem begins. Although nothing seen from the speaker's perspective is his, nevertheless the objects seen are aspects of his situation, which he talks of as petals. The poem unfolds by combining or “involving” these aspects or petals into the unity of its own occasion, which is where the aesthetic inversion occurs. More abstractly stated, these visual events are aspects of a relationship between the perceiver and the perceived. The details become more exact as the petals serve, in inverse fashion, to locate the flower. The flower emerges, then, as a nexus of relationships in which the poet locates himself. As Whitehead wrote, “The unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other times” (SMW 69). The poem, then, is a mode of engaging the world, a mode “through which the wind / combs.” Once initiated by these visual events, the poem then extends to involve other aspects of the situation. As the following stanzas make evident, any aspect of the emergent context can be brought forward into aesthetic relation by the compositional activity at hand. That is, any material or detail can be used to make the aesthetic event explicit, when that material is brought into the unity of the aesthetic event:

One petal goes eight blocks
past two churches and a brick school beyond
the edge of the park where under trees
leafless now, women having nothing else to do
sit in summer—to the small house
in which I happen to have been born. Or
a heap of dirt, if you care
to say it, frozen and sunstreaked in
the January sun, returning.
Then they hand you—they who wish to God
you’d keep your fingers out of
their business—science or philosophy or
anything else they can find to throw off
to distract you.

(CP1 322-25)

As a deliberate rhetorical strategy, Williams proceeds here by generating a context from concurrent events within the prehensive unity of an immediate situation. This poetic mode in effect addresses that situation and in doing so not only situates the poet but turns the context, from which the poem emerges, into the poem's content. The frame of reference is that situation. Each of the concurrent events, or details, has a past and a future, but they are all addressed in immediate terms, because they are all aspects of one event, relating to a single perspective. This mode functions as a means of bringing the perceiver into an explicitly aesthetic relationship with the perceived. By the end of the poem, Williams has made his relationship to the city explicit in a number of ways, defining it in terms of a complex of emotional, artistic, economic, and biographical factors. Those factors are, however, only the content, and a flower is more than an assemblage of petals. The aspects of his situation are only converted into petals when brought into the unity or gestalt of an aesthetic occasion. Williams spoke of this as a “resolution of difficulties” (SE 120). Such an aesthetic resolution achieves clarity, in Williams' terms, because writing, as a problem-solving activity, is a means of knowing. That organizing activity, which converts the aspects into petals, can be said to generate knowledge if the organization gives, in its structure, a new design to experience (SE 196).

4.

Disparaging references to science and philosophy, such as those quoted above, can be found in Williams' work as far back as 1917, in Kora in Hell (IMAG 13). They emerge more forcefully in Spring and All and then increase after the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922 (Weaver 44-6). Williams had a fundamental distrust of both “explanations” of the world. Although The Embodiment of Knowledge is ostensibly about education and art, Williams was preoccupied with an attempt to articulate that distrust, especially because he saw both Western science and philosophy at the basis of our educational practices. And there is a line of argument against science and philosophy in The Embodiment of Knowledge which, if isolated, bears an important relationship to the aesthetic under discussion here.

The Embodiment of Knowledge opens with the proposition that academicians place an undue emphasis on the accumulation and production of information, “a chaotic murk” that splinters attention into increasingly remote specializations, as epitomized by the slogan, “the more you learn the less you know” (EK 3). This leads to the “professions” of knowledge. They in turn create areas—bodies—of knowledge which are not only remote from common experience, but which only scholars have access to, a Sacred Grove (EK 72). The arcane knowledges produced by science and philosophy are then turned into hierarchic systems, protected by a priesthood. Such a Byzantine social order, founded on the accumulation of information, is what is ultimately behind “the colossal modern fetishes of ‘progress’” in America (EK 93). As a system of value, the common “body” of experience is then drained of significance. That inevitably leads to inhumane applications:

Science is a sham to him who sees his city destroyed by gunfire. Philosophy is a cheat to him who has lost that which he loves and knows no better than to weep.

(EK 39)

Williams did recognize a genuine category of knowledge generated by scientific practice. But science, he charges, no longer restricts itself to that particular category. Rather, it claims dominion over all categories of thought. Williams locates the emergence of this usurpation in the Renaissance, with the rise of empirical research. Francis Bacon is an example of the Renaissance man of science. To establish that knowledge is not the sole “property” of science, Williams contrasts Bacon with Shakespeare—an ignorant man, nearly anonymous, but whose intelligence was “subjugated to the instinctive whole as it must be.”⁴ Williams titled one section of The Embodiment of Knowledge “An Essay on William Shakespeare: My Grandfather.” His “grandfather” bears an uncanny resemblance to Noah Paterson, a point that probably could be brought to bear on Paterson (EK 110, 136). In terms of epistemology, the point seems incontestable. No one could reasonably say that Shakespeare wasn't knowledgeable; but his knowledge is certainly of a different order and articulation than Bacon's. Moreover, Shakespeare's knowledge was from a source outside the disciplines of science and philosophy. The point Williams would make is that knowledge occurs in all categories of thought and that it is not produced solely by a particular mode: “knowledge and philosophy … are distinct” (EK 79).

Using “Bacon and his confreres” as an example of people who have misconceived what knowledge is, Williams writes,

The lure of a solution of life carried them forward giving them the belief that to know everything was the end of knowledge, the same falsity that debauches the mind of a college boy to this day. … This is why Science—for that is what “science” has come to mean, the fiction itself, and Philosophy—for it is the same there—must be branded as lie.

(EK 68-9)

The fundamental error common to the goals of both science and philosophy, for Williams, is the belief that one can arrive at final location, as if at the end of an equation, a location conceived of as paradise (EK 122). As with Whitehead's argument against the concept of simple location, Williams is arguing against any position that would claim absolute knowledge. That claim would imply a transcendent subject who was not in time, but beyond it, and one specific category of thought with sole access to the truth, since that category provides the necessary knowledge for such a transcendence. But no such independent or absolute position is possible. Claims of a transcendent knowledge presuppose, falsely, an end of knowledge and a special category of knowledge which is absolutely privileged, even independent of the world. The result of such thinking renders all other forms of experience purposeless. “They attempt to do away with time,” Williams wrote, “in an absurd absolute …” which renders such practices inhumane (EK 88):

Until both science and philosophy, a part in the whole, renounce their transcendental pretensions and actively, themselves, combat their fetishism and relate themselves to the other categories, horizontally, in the general body of man—they are false.

(EK 88)

There must be, Williams argues, a general body of knowledge that is common “property” to all categories of thought, as the very basis of thinking. If so, any mode of knowing has equal status, as a discipline, with science and philosophy, because of that common basis. But while Williams deliberately avoids trying to prove scientific thought invalid on its own terms, as scientific thought, the argument nevertheless requires that he demonstrate an equivalence between knowledges produced in separate disciplines. In order to enter the Sacred Grove, Williams must demonstrate that knowledge is a common factor in every category of thought:

It must be shown that men in general have in them the same sort of knowledge with respect to elevated understanding, that scholarship has to it. There must be this basis on which the two shall meet. … It should be possible for a professor of———to discuss knowledge from a farmer, and to learn something to apply to his own sphere.

(EK 45)

To this problem he proposes an argument of several dimensions, all aspects of which are close to Whitehead's argument against the concept of simple location.

One stage in Williams' argument that knowledge is a common factor in all modes of thought, indeed a material people share, was to insist that “[t]he position of the mind is outside all categories” (EK 52), in order to assert that the categories have a common basis. The mind must be outside these categories simply to understand them as categories. In turn, if the mind can “conceive itself as standing beyond its processes” (EK 42), then these processes must have objective status. As Whitehead had argued, what the mind brings into unity are aspects of what lies beyond the cognitive event: “we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves” (SMW 150-1). For Williams, that objective status proves that the categories of thought are merely subdivisions of thinking about what lies outside the mind. The objective status of the contents of thought implies, then, that knowledge is a material common to each category and that each category is simply a mode of engaging the world. The problem then emerges of whether each category, as a means of knowing the world, is equal in status to the others.

The second stage in this demonstration involves the relationship of the parts to the whole, a key issue in The Embodiment of Knowledge. Beginning with the assertion that the whole “is greater than all its parts” (EK 60) and with the division of thought into formal categories, Williams builds from the fact that the categories are, by definition, partial, to the argument that they are only meaningful in relation to each other, as part of the larger category of man. Williams calls then for “a return to the category of the whole” (EK 125-7), in a way similar to Whitehead's insistence on prehensive unity as prime fact, because the categories of thought, scientific, philosophic and poetic (the only categories Williams fully discusses), “are departments of function in man” (EK 87). They can be realized, made valuable, only as subdivisions of that larger category. They require that larger category in order to function properly. Consequently, no one category can usurp the function of the others or assume greater importance “in the general body of man” (EK 88). Each has its “place” and its own integrity.

The third dimension or stage to Williams' argument takes as an additional premise that no person can know all of human knowledge, what all human beings collectively know. It follows that any individual understanding must be fragmentary in relation to that whole. Williams then argues that knowledge is collectively engaged in, that knowledge is located outside the mind, and in parallel, that the whole of knowledge will always be indeterminate, imagined (a point similar to one Whitehead made when discussing the Romantics, SMW 87-8). For Whitehead, each part mirrors an aspect of the whole, as it partakes of the whole. For Williams, since we inevitably lack knowledge of the totality of knowledge, we must start any discussion of knowledge from within the shared basis of what we do know, namely, that each category of thought is only an aspect of what humanity at large knows and that each category can only mirror that whole as it partakes in humanity.

Thus, knowledge can only be adequately spoken of in terms of its common, shared basis in humanity. That common basis proves, for Williams, that the categories are qualitatively equal, because all categories must partake in the relationship of part to whole, rather than in a hierarchical relation, wherein one category is subsumed by another. Only by doing so can they mirror an aspect of that common basis in humanity. Moreover, all claims to knowledge involve an assumption of that whole, but those claims can only be provisionally verified, verified on the common basis of what all people know (EK 53, 59-61), that is, from within a shared definition, collectively engaged in:

Knowledge must be proven to us, not we to it. It must be universal to humanity, in some form permeable to everyone at once—in some form—or it is not true, and cannot be proven. In fact, that the proofs of scholarship are not proofs at all but trials in vacuo. …

(EK 44-5)

The “conclusions” of scholarship are valid only “when proven—upon humanity” (EK 45). An art such as Shakespeare's, of course, has this universal basis. And so by “reversing the current” (EK 59), Williams would put the “burden of proof” on the academics, challenging them to prove that their knowledge has a common basis in humanity. The pretensions of science and philosophy, for Williams, are warranted only if one can prove that one's knowledge partakes of the Absolute:

That if I am without proofs—they are without proofs also—which must be obvious to them since they know that until they know the whole no part can be likened to it.

(EK 45)

In contrast, Williams establishes knowledge on a provisional basis, related to mankind at large. The provisional nature of knowledge, its lack of finality, does not invalidate a claim either to its common basis or to its accuracy, if that knowledge is not conceived of in absolute terms. Moreover, one can know that the basis of one's knowledge is an all-encompassing ignorance: “Before science, philosophy, religion, ethics—before they can begin to function—is a region unsusceptible to argument” (EK 130). This region is inaccessible because it is beyond logical comprehension; we are, moreover, totally within it. But our knowledge does not arise from what must be, by definition, beyond comprehension, even if the incomprehensible is at the basis of comprehension (EK 131). Whitehead made a parallel argument for the necessary limitation of rationality in an irrational limit, of which God is the ultimate irrationality and ultimate limit. Given that limit, further knowledge of God “must be sought in the region of particular experiences, and therefore rests on an empirical basis” (SMW 178). Likewise, Williams talks of “the immaterial ultimate reality guessed at by philosophers” and of what is “outside of deduction and unscalable by reason” ([sic] EK 131). After proposing that knowledge does not originate at the limitation of understanding, in the irrational, Williams writes, “Yet there is a palpable mode by which this ‘beginning’ is universally objectified, where it centers not as a mystery, and that is place” (EK 131). And place offers something of a catalyst to the entire argument in The Embodiment of Knowledge, albeit only as it relates to what is under discussion here.

Williams conceived of place as geographical location, but also in terms of the immediate context of one's physical location, “where we happen to be” (EK 98), and as such place is anterior to all categories of thought. Moreover,

There is a certain position of the understanding anterior to all systems of thought, as well as of fact and of deed—that is common to all: it is that in which the thinker places himself on the near side of reality—abjures the unknowable and begins within a certain tacitly limited field of human possibility to seek wisdom.

(EK 132)

The position of understanding common to all systems of thought is likewise anterior to those systems and so has a primary relation with place, for that is where understanding begins. Williams' concept of place is related to his concepts of contact, locale, and origin, the rationale behind In the American Grain. But “place” here is also conceived of as the very basis of human understanding, the context of thought, and as such, the “palpable mode” by which knowledge is made possible. As with Whitehead's argument against the concept of simple location, every place partakes of every other place, “one like another” (EK 98), and anything achieved in one particular place can be realized as having universal human currency, just as knowledge does. But the relation of one's understanding to “place” remains primary. “Objectified, it is place itself—on which all arguments fall” (EK 133). To abstract knowledge or the understanding from its place “in the breast of man,” setting a “premium on placelessness,” not only deprives experience of value, but leads to inhumane applications. The understanding does not transcend the immediacy of its own occasion, nor is it independent of context. Place alone “affirms man as the judge of all his own activities” (EK 131-4):

Above everything else if knowledge is to be salvaged at all it must be placed anterior to psychology and leave that strictly alone. It must be located outside the mind.

(EK 132)

What we seek, Williams argued, must be “within the bounds of human understanding or beyond it” (EK 42), must be within a “tacitly limited field,” because if we locate knowledge beyond understanding then we have obviously misconceived it. Place serves as the contextual premise to understanding, and knowledge is objectified in place. There is no way to talk of the unknown save through “place”; place is the mode by which “the prelogical is made known to us” (EK 131). Because consciousness is “placed” in the body, knowledge as a body, in both the literal and metaphoric sense, is the common currency of human experience. But Williams further asserts, “All knowledge must be conceived as within the scope of human understanding; that is, any human understanding, therefore it is less than all or any, and its acquirement is a series within the scope of the mind” (EK 41). That is, knowledge is finite, arising from the relation between understanding and place. Because knowledge is bounded by the field of human understanding, the acquisition of knowledge must be serial, rather than accumulative, for knowledge must relate back to place in immediate, concrete terms. That is why abstraction, for Whitehead, was “the major vice of the intellect.” To borrow from Whitehead, the acquisition of knowledge occurs within an “interlocked plurality of modes” (SMW 70). But while knowledge gives the understanding a kind of currency for Williams, there is no single perspective to which understanding is limited. And when knowledge is conceived as “within the scope of any human understanding,” knowledge takes on value because of its shared basis. As Williams writes, when discussing philosophy,

Each proposition of philosophy is not proven until it has been proven in each case. The adductions of each man are knowledge balanced by knowledge in every other man, having actuality by that in other men and equal (tho' dissimilar) knowledge. Knowledge, I wish to point out, is the coin, Gains its value by a gift as between each man.

(EK 79)

Although this argument relies on the prior parts-to-whole argument, again it is similar to the one Whitehead made when discussing simple location: A particular volume can only be addressed by making essential reference to other volumes, which in turn require reference, as an interlocked series. Here, a particular fact or proposition can be established only when an essential relationship to all other established facts has been proven. All of the facts of which our knowledge is composed are interrelated as a series. They must be shared, proving they partake of the whole, that is, have a common basis in humanity, to take on value. On this basis, then, Williams would penetrate the Sacred Groves of Academe to evaluate academic claims to knowledge.

There is unity, of course, and the final term of all investigation; it is the individual himself. Anyone must have as his fundamental determination a complete association of all the activities of his life and their implications. It is the various implications which constitute the sciences, arts, philosophies and so forth. But the unity they seek is behind them not before.

(EK 73)

The only unity available by which to make a “complete association” is that of an individual existence, but that unity is anterior to understanding. That is to say, that unity is prehensive. That unity is provided, again, by place, the origin or locale. Should one, by a “fundamental determination,” wish to know this unity, one must master “some craft, some art, some investigation,” Williams writes, taking one of the “implications” as a “track for his efforts,” which, with experience, “becomes more comprehensive …” (EK 73). The means by which to know this unity, then, is the practice of an art such as poetry. Although others see that art as growing more complex with time, for the artist it becomes “simpler and simpler,” and “within himself, since it shows itself more and more as the type of all his desires, it approaches unity or as it is said, becomes more expressive of what he is himself” (EK 73).

Although it is doubtful that Williams is deliberately following Whitehead here, one can speak of this restriction to one category of thought, the art of poetry in this instance, as the mode of knowing unity. For Whitehead's third characteristic of space-time is the modal, that of specific limitation. Such restriction, Whitehead wrote, “is the price of value” (SMW 178). Whitehead used the word “extrinsic” to talk of the relationship one event had to other events, and he used the word “intrinsic” to talk of the relations inherent in any event, since every event unifies other events. Whitehead used the word “value” for the “intrinsic reality of an event” (SMW 93-4, 103-04). Williams speaks from this same paradigm when discussing the pure and practical relationships in and between the categories of thought. Discussing Stein's work in The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams notes that “… writing[,] to be of value to the intelligence[,] is not made up of ideas, emotions, data, but of words in configurations fresh to our senses” (EK 17). Which is to say, Williams locates the value of a work in art in the intrinsic organization of its materials, in the design. These new configurations are generative; the mind is “liberated to function in a new way” (EK 18).

Williams had spoken of value as an aesthetic achievement, and largely in terms of the imagination, from Kora in Hell in 1917 through Spring and All+ (1923). In arguing against the epistemological claims of Science and Philosophy in The Embodiment of Knowledge, Williams brings that theory of value to bear on the problem of knowledge. As a mode of knowing unity, an art must be practiced purely for the aesthetic values that it generates, for that is a way to achieve clarity. But “value” is not simply a consequence of achieving aesthetic or individual unity, because value, for Williams, is more than a subjective event. “It is knowledge that is the basis of art,” Williams writes (EK 80), and his concept of value is closely associated with his concept of knowledge. Knowledge, for Williams, must be proven to “men in general” and gains value from that shared basis (EK 45, 79). Consequently, from that shared basis, “knowledge … gives a thing value, universal transmutability,” and knowledge “alone solves multiplicity” (EK 80). The value realized by an individual artist results in the formal organization or design of the materials, the content. But a work of art must partake in humanity at large in order to gain universal currency or value, for the work must be based on knowledge. That is, the value achieved by the individual, in realizing or “knowing” his or her own unity through an artistic work, is likewise achieved through humanity at large. This is, again, a version of Williams' part to whole argument: The individual must partake in humanity if the work is to “embody knowledge.”

There is one further step in Williams' thought, for the source of all knowledge is place. The problem with academics, Williams wrote in The Little Review in 1929, is that they fail “to connect knowledge with a source.” As he goes on to say, all great literature “has been stamped with the local power that has generated it … everything of value belonging to some place and retaining always its value of that place” (21.2 [May, 1929], 95). The value of a literary work both derives from and belongs to the prehensive unity of place, so it would seem that value is a local phenomenon. Knowledge, on the other hand, gains value only when shared by humanity at large, even though knowledge likewise has its origin in place. Williams' formulation here is slippery, perhaps contradictory, but is clarified by Whitehead's argument against simple location: “For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world” (SMW 91). Knowledge is capable of universal application because each location involves other locations, and all locations participate in a larger whole. Knowledge gains value because it can be shared by people in other locations. But value is only achieved in specific locations, in an immediate context. A work of art, say a play by Shakespeare, achieves value in that context, but only as it becomes a form of knowledge; for the work is not only based on knowledge but must also generate knowledge (EK 98).

To reiterate the argument, albeit not one that Williams made explicit, knowledge, as both the basis of art and the material of thought, is located outside the mind; knowledge is what the mind brings into unity or aesthetic design. The mode by which knowledge is made available is place, and for convenience, place can be termed the perceived. But place is also the context of individual perceptions, and that context is essential to prehensive individual unity. In order to know this unity (to attain clarity), the individual perceiver must practice an art, an art which becomes more comprehensive with experience. That art, then, becomes the mode of knowing one's unity, but the unity revealed as knowledge must in turn be the prehensive unity of place. That is, the outside becomes inside, and vice versa. So that one's art, expressing “what he is himself,” as they say, actually is an expression of the essential relationship between self and place, the perceiver and the perceived, within a specific duration of time and occupying a specific region in space (see, for instance, EK 149). And that, in Whitehead's terms, is an expression of value. But that value, in Williams' terms, is not solely a matter of one's individuality, for the relationship between self and place must be realized in a work of art, must become known, in order to take on value as an expression of place, and that involves humanity.

6.

Williams often refers to the basis of the relationship between self and place as “the actual” or “actuality,” as in “the embodied or actual view” (EK 43) and “the actual shape of lives” (EK 100; see also EK 36, 72, 98). Williams uses the same term when speaking of poetry, for the poet makes “actual” the relationship between self and place. But to do that, the poet must make the writing “actual”:

—the futility of deeds, and that man is real only as an imaginative speech.

—and the more keen, the more immanent the perception, practice, realization of this in the work, the more actual the writing.

(EK 14)

Williams had used the term prior to this, in Spring and All and “Paterson” for instance, but it is a key term for Whitehead as well. And while it is clear that Williams is not borrowing from Whitehead, there is obviously a convergence between the two; the term becomes of critical importance to Williams after his reading of Whitehead.

Williams makes important reference to “the actual” in The Embodiment of Knowledge, but as an explanatory term for the inclusive basis of both self and place, “the actual” figures most prominently in January: A Novelette, written in 1929. January also offers clues about that elevated understanding in which all categories of thought “are linked in a new series running transverse to the old” (EK 72), because in January, where Williams begins “to sound like an American,” there is a breakthrough to a new comprehensive basis and a break away from the “yardstick” of literature (IMAG 295. EK 95-6). In January, Williams presents writing “as an actual creation” in order to establish “a new category of understanding in which writing will deal with—” (IMAG 293-4) what he again terms “the actual”: “The actual is another field, the field of art, which must liberate from the defects of philosophy and science, body, mind and morals” (IMAG 305). And the argument Williams makes in January against the yardstick of literature is identical to the one he made against the validity of academic knowledge, namely that it has no basis in common humanity.

Addressing his wife, Floss, in the seventh chapter, Williams writes:

In the past the excellence of literature has been conceived upon a borrowed basis. In this you have no existence. I am broken apart, not so much with various desire—but with the inability to conceive desire upon a basis that is satisfactory to either.

The common resort is to divorce. What is that? It is for the police.

But to me it has always been that until a new plane of understanding has been established—or discovered, all the values which we attempt are worthless.

This is literature. Say there are ten men in love with you, perhaps an exaggeration. To five women it will be inconceivable.

What is humanity to this, whether you do or whether you do not? All present day writing is upon such a basis. But should we succeed in deciphering the difficulty; should there be a mode by which to discover a common basis on which to act without cataclysm feeling—

This would be humanity itself.

(IMAG 293-34)

In the past, the value of literature was determined on a basis borrowed from another category of thought, hence literature “copied” scientific or philosophical values. When the “traditional yardstick” by which literature is measured is borrowed from a philosophic or scientific estimate of what is real, literature is not thought of in and of itself as literature, nor is it thought of as a mode of knowing what is real. Consequently, literature is conceived of as merely subjective expression, lacking extension to humanity at large (“To five women it will be inconceivable”). Williams seeks, then, “a mode by which to discover a common basis” in humanity in order that his art partake in humanity on a parts-to-whole basis. The new plane of understanding which Williams would establish is “the actual,” what all people share. The key, Williams proposes in January, is to make the writing show itself explicitly as writing or, as he argued in The Embodiment of Knowledge, “knowledge presented in the form of pure writing which is made of the writing itself” (IMAG 296, EK 73). As writing becomes actual in itself as writing, it is grounded not in the personality of the writer, but in the common basis of humanity, the actual.

Still addressing his wife, Williams goes on to say that a “fierce singleness” has fused his marriage and his writing, “so that the seriousness of my life and common objects about me have made up an actuality of which I am assembling the parts” (294). That is to say, writing is a mode of unifying inside and out by a sustained interpenetration, a “fierce singleness.” Using the same parts-to-whole argument, the difficulty will be resolved, Williams says, by “greater fracture,” by an “original force of understanding which by a fierce singleness liberates on a fresh plane to perform in a new way that will include the world” (IMAG 296). This parallels the previously quoted passage, in The Embodiment, on the individual achieving unity by a “fundamental determination” to associate “all the activities of his life and their implications” (EK 73). By causing greater fracture in the writing, this impulse to “include the world” transforms writing into a part of the actual:

Writing that would solve this[,] by being actually itself[,] would be in itself a general idea of the most concrete, as art (without just honor) has always been.

(IMAG 296)

This new concept of writing is distinguished from reflective, representational modes, because they only produce, in Williams' terms, a simulacrum (EK 98). There is no displacement outward towards a referent in the new writing; that would be writing on a borrowed basis, extrinsic to literature. This writing is anti-allegorical, as he titles one chapter. There is “no symbolism, no evocation of an image” (IMAG 299). This new concept of writing-as-event, although by no means derivative, is clearly related to Whitehead's sense of modality, for the writing has become, for Williams, a form or manifestation of “the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes” (SMW 70). One breaks through the old category of literature to the actual by a fierce singleness which, in turn, elevates the understanding to that “single significance in every minutest gesture of my life of which I am a part only” (IMAG 295-6).

When words are “on a par with trees” (IMAG 294), both words and trees participate in an event that is larger than both, a world held in common, as in “The Wind Increases,” written in 1928:

The harried
earth is swept
                                        The trees
the tulips bright
tips
                                        sidle and
toss—
                                        Loose your love
to flow
Blow!
Good christ what is
a poet—if any
                                        exists?
a man
whose words will
                                        bite
their way
home—being actual
having the form
                                        of motion.

(CP1 339)

When words are “on a par with trees,” they have the same form of motion the wind gives to the trees. Being actual, the words have—as the form of motion—a design “stamped with the local power that has generated it” (LR 95). The words, moreover, share the same value the trees have, partaking in the actual by an original, indeed, originating force of understanding (IMAG 296). The writing then becomes “an actual creation” (IMAG 293), inclusive of the world, because it stands in relation as part to whole, “in which there exists (instead of ‘you exist’)” (IMAG 304). An embodiment of knowledge, in these terms, makes one's knowledge part of the organization of the whole, makes one's knowledge actual. As an embodiment of knowledge, poetry thus becomes a means of participating in the creation of the actual:

Beginning: Nothing less is intended than a revolution in thought with writing as the fulcrum, by means of which—and the accidental place, any place, therefore America—one like another, therefore where we happen to be, our locality, as base.

(EK 98)

Through the act of writing, as a means of making actual “the reality of man” (EK 12), Williams has made writing into an expression, or from Whitehead, a realization of the actual. But this is foremost a matter of agency, of making manifest one's imaginative engagement. For the expression is only made valuable by a “comprehensive organization” of the artist's materials. And the words become “on a par with trees” only because of a creative interpenetration of perceiver and perceived. That is, one's agency is made manifest or “actual” by the imagination. With the act of writing as the fulcrum, one's imagination emerges as the locus of attention, both in making words actual and in giving them unity as a design, but further as one's mode of engagement with the world. Hence, Williams' use of the word “vision,” as in a “vision of the facts” (CP1 312). That is why, moreover, the “reality of man is an imaginative speech.” The work of art doesn't “borrow” or derive its value from those facts, as if content were of primary importance, because the writing is an event in and of itself. As an event, the writing partakes of the actual in order to manifest as writing. “[A]n event is a matter of fact,” Whitehead writes, “which by reason of its limitation is a value for itself; but by reason of its very nature it also requires the whole universe in order to be itself” (SMW 194). All factual events are expressions of value, being actual, because of their prehensive unity. And as Whitehead writes, “no value is to be ascribed to the underlying activity as divorced from the matter-of-fact events of the real world” (SMW 105). For “the actuality,” he writes, “is the value.” Or as Williams had written:

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the black faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained
secret—into the body of light—

(CP1 263)

Williams spoke often of the poet becoming “nature's active part” when in the act of writing, a creative force participating in the construction of the world (IN 29, SE 302-6). Williams spoke of art, in January, as a way “to advance, that is, the concept of the real, the actual” (IMAG 302). In such terms, poetry doesn't conform to the real, as a reiteration of experience. Rather, the poet partakes of the real and the poem becomes an instance of the actual, as it achieves reality. As such an instance, for Williams, the poem enlarges nature (SE 302). The writing is the means, then, by which the perceiver penetrates the perceived, “turning the in out” (P 162), on the basis of the actual, and in that moment of imaginative suspense, is likewise penetrated by the perceived:

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts
alight and scatter—
Who are these people (how complex
this mathematic) among whom I see myself
in the regularly ordered plateglass of
his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles—?

(CP1 264)

With this interpenetration, a reversal occurs. “His” thoughts, Paterson's, are the people among whom Williams sees himself. But Williams sees himself revealed as a reflection in Paterson's thoughts, and it is through Paterson's thoughts that Williams comes to expression. Because the poetry proceeds “in a mode by which to discover a common basis,” Paterson's thoughts are revealed to Williams as actual people and things, in consequence of Williams' involvement with the world. As a mode of address, the poetry manifests itself as an engagement in and with the world and proceeds by making that “contact” an aesthetic expression of value. The actual becomes simultaneously an expression of value, being actual, and an expression of “his most intimate convictions,” an identity (P 7). As a form of knowledge, the significance of the poem is not the result of an explanatory content, for that would be to conceive of poetry on a borrowed basis. “Its significance is itself, as fresh as a new leaf” (EK 120). Knowledge is not something arrived at, here, like a product at the end of an equation, but rather is at the very basis of writing, and the writing is creative. The poem is what is arrived at, as “the flower of action,” and the poem embodies knowledge, “knowledge in the flesh,” as Williams wrote to Kenneth Burke (SL 137), because the poem makes knowledge actual.

One of Williams' ambitions for The Embodiment of Knowledge was to establish “Rembrandt, Bach, Stradivarius … on an equal plane with Galileo, Gregory” (EK 50). With an elevated understanding, “a new order of knowing,” artistic achievements would be seen as equalling those of science and philosophy. As “departments of function in man,” each category of thought or discipline would be related, in a transverse series, to “the general body of man” (EK 87-8). Literature would be judged according to intrinsic standards, rather than by those of another category, such as philosophy. But to conceive of poetry as a form of knowledge, distinct from and equal to scientific and philosophic forms of knowledge, involved a revaluation of what knowledge is, as their common basis. Williams' account is largely procedural, emphasizing the use to which knowledge is put, in order that it have human value.

Speaking with approval of the apprentice system, Williams writes that knowledge was then “a means, not an end—and it was consequently humane, logically based on a clarity as the culmination of understanding” (EK 50). As the culmination of understanding, clarity is based not on knowledge per se, but on the actual world of the senses, on the act of apprehension. As in Williams' example of the deduction, knowledge is not the result of thought, but rather the means by which we achieve understanding. The end result is clarity, possibility, extension into the world, “a liberation of the man himself” (EK 139). Any explanatory account, Williams seems to have intuited, involves a hierarchy and belies a political agenda. Any explanatory account would have placed him in the hands of “the pinching academy.” By decentralizing knowledge and elevating the status of understanding, an emphasis “on all that is learned,” Williams would establish “the pluralism of experience,” for any “central supremacy … in effect [is] a denial of reality, not its culmination” (EK 138, 149-50). That pluralism, “concretely and in fact,” is outside of “abstract summary” and generalization. For again, as Whitehead wrote, “the world, as known, transcends the subject which is cognisant of it” (SMW 90). And that outside or common world is what must finally be emphasized. Or as Williams wrote,

What wind and sun of children stamping the snow
stamping the snow and screaming drunkenly
The actual, florid detail of cheap carpet
amazingly upon the floor and paid for
as no portrait ever was—Canary singing
and geraniums in tin cans spreading their leaves
reflecting red upon the frost—
They are the divisions and imbalances
of his whole concept, made small by pity
and desire, they are—no ideas besides the facts—

(CP1 265-6)

Notes

1. Williams, William Carlos. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Ed. John C. Thirwall. New York: 1984, pp. 71-91. The following abbreviations refer to texts commonly cited in this essay:

   CP1. Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939. Eds. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986.

   EK. Williams, William Carlos. The Embodiment of Knowledge. Ed. Ron Loewinsohn. New York: New Directions, 1977.

   IMAG. Williams, William Carlos. Imaginations. Ed. Webster Schott. New York: New Directions, 1971.

   IN. Williams, William Carlos. Interviews with William Carlos Williams: “Speaking Straight Ahead.” Ed. Linda Wagner. New York: New Directions, 1976.

   LR. Williams, William Carlos. “A Tentative Statement.” The Little Review, 12.2 (May, 1929): 95-8.

   P. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963.

   SE. Williams, William Carlos. The Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1969.

   SL. Williams, William Carlos. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. Ed. John C. Thirwall. New York: New Directions, 1984.

   SMW. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

2. For simplicity, the terms “perceiver and perceived” have been used in this essay, rather than terms like “subject and object” or “knower and known.” To perceive here means simply “to become aware of through the senses,” but Whitehead's use of the word “perception” should also be kept in mind: “Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification” (SMW 71).

3. As Robert Duncan, another poet sympathetic to Whitehead, has phrased it: “Fact and reason are creations of man's genius to secure a point of view protected against a vision of life where information and intelligence invade us, where what we know shapes us and we become creatures, not rulers, of what is. Where, more, we are part of the creative process, not its goal” (Duncan 101).

4. I chose this quote from The Descent of Winter (CPI 311), because the phrase “instinctive whole” is related to Williams' argument, in The Embodiment of Knowledge, concerning the parts and the whole. The statement is congruent with others made about Shakespeare in The Embodiment of Knowledge (for instance, see EK 110).

Works Cited

Baldwin, Neil and Stephen Myers. The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams in the Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

Bruner, Jerome S. Towards a Theory of Instruction. New York: Norton, 1968.

Duncan, Robert. Fictive Certainties. New York: New Directions, 1985.

Gee, James Paul. “The Structure of Perception in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams, A Stylistic Analysis.” Poetics Today 6.3, 375-397.

Heisenberg, Werner. The Physicist's Conception of Nature. Trans. Arnold J. Pomerans. New York: Harcourt, 1955.

Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams, A New World Naked. New York: McGraw, 1981.

Miller, J. Hillis. Poets of Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966.

Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968.

Russell, Bertrand. Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits. New York: Simon, 1948.

Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams, The American Background. New York: Cambridge UP, 1977.