[In the following review of Discrete Series, Williams discusses what makes a poem a poem, what makes a poem good, and praises Oppen for writing good poems.]

[In Discrete Series] Mr. Oppen has given us thirty-seven pages of short poems, well printed and well bound, around which several statements relative to modern verse forms may well be made.

The appearance of a book of poems, if it be a book of good poems, is an important event because of relationships the work it contains will have with thought and accomplishment in other contemporary reaches of the intelligence. This leads to a definition of the term “good.” If the poems in the book constitute necessary corrections of or emendations to human conduct in their day, both as to thought and manner, then they are good. But if these changes originated in the poems, causing thereby a direct liberation of the intelligence, then the book becomes of importance to the highest degree.

But this importance cannot be in what the poem says, since in that case the fact that it is a poem would be a redundancy. The importance lies in what the poem is. Its existence as a poem is of first importance, a technical matter, as with all facts, compelling the recognition of a mechanical structure. A poem which does not arouse respect for the technical requirements of its own mechanics may have anything you please painted all over it or on it in the way of meaning but it will for all that be as empty as a man made of wax or straw.

It is the acceptable fact of a poem as a mechanism that is the proof of its meaning and this is as technical a matter as in the case of any other machine. Without the poem being a workable mechanism in its own right, a mechanism which arises from, while at the same time it constitutes the meaning of, the poem as a whole, it will remain ineffective. And what it says regarding the use or worth of that particular piece of “propaganda” which it is detailing will never be convincing.

The preface seems to me irrelevant. Why mention something which the book is believed definitely not to resemble? “Discrete” in the sense used by Mr. Oppen, is, in all probability, meant merely to designate a series separate from other series. I feel that he is justified in so using the term. It has something of the implications about it of work in a laboratory when one is following what he believes to be a profitable lead along some one line of possible investigation.

This indicates what is probably the correct way to view the book as well as the best way to obtain pleasure from it. Very few people, not to say critics, see poetry in their day as a moment in the long-drawn periodic progress of an ever-changing activity toward occasional peaks of surpassing excellence. Yet these are the correct historic facts of the case. These high periods rest on the continuity of what has gone before. As a corollary, most critics fail to connect up the apparently dissociated work of the various men writing contemporaneously in a general scheme of understanding. Most commentators are, to be sure, incapable of doing so since they have no valid technical knowledge of the difficulties involved, what has to be destroyed since it is dead, and what saved and treasured. The dead, granted, was once alive but now it is dead and it stinks.

The term, technical excellence, has an unpoetic sound to most ears. But if an intelligence be deeply concerned with the bringing up of the body of poetry to a contemporary level equal with the excellences of other times, technique means everything. Surely an apprentice watching his master sees nothing prosaic about the details of technique. Nor would he find a narrow world because of the smallness of the aperture through which he views it, but through that pinhole, rather, a world enormous as his mind permits him to witness.

A friend sticks his head in at the door and says, “Why all the junk standing around?”

The one at work, startled perhaps, looks up puzzled and tries to comprehend the dullness of his friend.

Were there an accredited critic of any understanding about, he might be able to correlate the details of the situation, bringing a reasonable order into these affairs. But the only accredited critics are those who, seeking order, have proceeded to cut away all the material they do not understand in order to obtain it. Since man has two legs, then so also must the elephant. Cut off the ones that are redundant! Following this, logically, they describe a hollow tail and a tassel sticking out just above the mouth. This is my considered opinion of the position of the formerly alert critic, T. S. Eliot.

Then there are the people who do reviews for the newspapers. They haven't the vaguest notion why one word follows another, but deal directly with meanings themselves.

An imaginable new social order would require a skeleton of severe discipline for its realization and maintenance. Thus by a sharp restriction to essentials, the seriousness of a new order is brought to realization. Poetry might turn this condition to its own ends. Only by being an object sharply defined and without redundancy will its form project whatever meaning is required of it. It could well be, at the same time, first and last a poem facing as it must the dialectic necessities of its day. Oppen has carried this social necessity, so far as poetry may be concerned in it, over to an extreme.

Such an undertaking will be as well a criticism of the classics, a movement that seeks to be made up only of essentials and to discover what they are. The classics are for modern purposes just so much old coach.

And once again, for the glad, the young and the enthusiastic, let it be said that such statement as the above has nothing to do with the abiding excellence of the classics but only with their availability as a means toward present ends. In the light of that objective, they are nostalgic obstacles.

Oppen has moved to present a clear outline for an understanding of what a new construction would require. His poems seek an irreducible minimum in the means for the achievement of their objective, no loose bolts or beams sticking out unattached at one end or put there to hold up a rococo cupid or a concrete saint, nor either to be a frame for a portrait of mother or a deceased wife.

The words are plain words; the metric is taken from speech; the colors, images, moods are not suburban, not peasant-restricted to serve as a pertinent example. A Discrete Series. This is the work of a “stinking” intellectual, if you please. That is, you should use the man as you would use any other mechanic—to serve a purpose for which training, his head, his general abilities fit him, to build with—that others may build after him.

Such service would be timely today since people are beginning to forget that poems are constructions. One no longer hears poems spoken of as good or bad; that is, whether or not they do or do not stand up and hold together. One is likely, rather, to hear of them now as “proletarian” or “fascist” or whatever it may be. The social school of criticism is getting to be almost as subversive to the intelligence as the religious school nearly succeeded in being in the recent past.

The mast
Inaudibly soars; bole-like, tapering
Sail flattens from it beneath the wind.
The limp water holds the boat's round sides. Sun
Slants dry light on the deck. Beneath us glide
Rocks, sand, and unrimmed holes.

Whether or not a poem of this sort, technically excellent, will be read over and over again, year after year, perhaps century after century, as, let us say, some of Dante's sonnets have been read over and over again by succeeding generations—seems to me to be beside the point. Or that such a test is the sole criterion of excellence in a poem—who shall say? I wish merely to affirm in my own right that unless a poem rests on the bedrock of a craftsmanlike economy of means, its value must remain of a secondary order, and that for this reason good work, such as that shown among Mr. Oppen's poems, should be praised.