[In the following essay, originally published in 1946, Williams offers a positive assessment of Essay on Rime.]

(Editor's Note: William Carlos Williams is treated by Shapiro as an "objectivist" poet, in part as follows:

Suppose all women were delightful, the ugly, the short, the fat, the intellectual, the stupid, even the old—and making a virtue of their qualities, each for each, made themselves available to men, some man, any man—without greed. What a world it could be—for women! In the same figure take all the forms of rime. Take for instance the fat: If she were not too self-conscious, did not regret that she were not lissome and quick afoot but gave herself, full-belly, to the sport! What a game it would make! All would then be, in the best sense, beautiful—entertaining to the mind as to the eye but especially to that part of a man which we call so mistakenly the intellect. It is rather the whole man, the man himself, alert. He would be analyzed by their deportment and enriched in the very libraries of his conscience. He would be free, freed to the full completion of his desires.

Shapiro speaks lovingly of his "rime," which he defines here and there in his poem—variously, as it should (not) be defined. It is the whole body of the management of words to the formal purposes of expression. We express ourselves there (men) as we might on the whole body of the various female could we ever gain access to her (which we cannot and never shall). Do we have to feel inferior or thwarted because of that? Of course not. We do the best we can—as much as the females of our souls permit. Which isn't much generally. Each man writes as he is able under the circumstances under which he exists.

The trouble with this exercise of Shapiro's is that it is so damned easy to read, so interesting, such a pleasure. One can sympathize with a man sitting down in a "camp" somewhere, bored stiff by removal from his usual environment and playing (in vacuo, so to speak) with the problems he must someday face in practical work. He doesn't solve much, he doesn't expect to solve much, he wants only to clarify, to make a definite distinction between the parts of the great body that presents itself to him for his enjoyment. He attacks it bravely. She lies back and smiles—not with any intent to intimidate. She is very definitely sure of herself and—friendly. Whether she will be stirred to passion by his attack is a question. But he is young and that's a lot.

Well, you don't get far with women by quoting Eliot to them. Maybe the Sacred Hind means something to them—and wistfulness is dear to the female heart but I don't believe it beyond a certain point. She gets tired of being tickled merely.

However, we're talking of the art of writing well in a modern world and women haven't much to do with that, I guess. Not directly. America is still too crude for that. I don't think any place is much better. Not France. Not England—so far as I know. And not Russia. Of course it's ridiculous to think of any land, as a land, in this respect. Women are as various (and as rare) as men.

What Shapiro does point out however is that—

I imagine that will put a quietus on the "abstractionists" so far as writing (with words) is concerned. It's all right to make Maltese crosses of poems and use words as pigments—but, well … Women want men to come to the point. Writing, too, is like that. At least I think that is what Shapiro means, relative to the prosody. If so I agree with him.

I admire his respect for Milton (page Winters) especially with reference to the amazing transition Milton effects between the dialogue and the chorus in Samson. But I am especially interested in the view he takes of Milton the craftsman, to whom he calls strongest attention—though I must say it would have been better if he had a little stressed the necessity Milton was under in achieving his effects to distort the language in ways we may not descend to. He however ignores, as what craftsman must not, the mere subject of Milton's major poem. Lesser critics do not get beyond that.

Shapiro intimates the formal importance of Whitman—another thing nobody notices. Nobody notices enough, that is.

Oh, well, I've only read halfway through his poem as yet. I think it is illuminating in its summations of the field, the large expanse of what we must approach to be masterful.

I came at the book with positive aversion. What the hell! But he has won me. I think Shapiro may very well—at least I permit him to go on writing. He isn't a liar, he isn't an ape, he isn't just sad over the state of the world and the stars, he doesn't even bother to concern himself with humanity, or economics, or sociology or any other trio.

He's almost painfully interested in writing as it has been, masterfully, in the world and as it may be (under changed and changing conditions) in the world again. He keeps on the subject. And that's rare. More power to him. I hope he finds her rarest treasures—I am not jealous.

Beginning toward the last thousand lines I find—

There are many such successful aphorisms among the two thousand lines, not the worst part of the poem—good summations of fumbled concepts we all play at remembering.

Then he goes off on A. It may be a personal matter with him but I don't know one man writing in America today who ever reads A. or so much as thinks of him or his work when writing. I may be uninformed, I merely mention what to me is a commonplace. Vazakas once went to see A. at Swarthmore and found him a nice boy, still, and very kind—but I didn't discover that he came away with any broader impression—and with the next sentence we were talking of other matters. This infatuation I think reveals Shapiro's faulty objective in some of his work. A. seems frankly to be desperately fumbling with a complicated apparatus—to find, to find—could it possibly be something not discoverable here? That would really be too bad.

We haven't half enough translations. How can Shapiro say historians will discover we've had too many? I am sure Ezra Pound will be known principally for his translations, the most exquisite in our language. Of bad translations, yes, we've had too many—and of translations of bad poetry, popular at the moment, far, far too many. Rilke and Rimbaud ad nauseam. Why don't we read them at least in the originals? Every translation I have ever read of either painfully stinks.

Yop. "And less verse of the mind."

I can't agree on Hart Crane. He had got to the end of his method, it never was more than an excrescence—no matter what the man himself may have been. He had written it right and left, front and back, up and down and round in a circle both ways, crisscross and at varying speeds. He couldn't do it any longer. He was on his way back from Mexico to—work. And couldn't work. He was returning to create and had finished creating. Peggy said that in the last three hours he beat on her cabin door—after being deceived and thrashed. He didn't know where to turn—that was the end of it.

That he had the guts to go over the rail in his pyjamas, unable to sleep or even rest, was, to me (though what do I know—more than another?) a failure to find anywhere in his "rime" an outlet. He had tried in Mexico merely to write—to write anything. He couldn't.

Yes, love might have saved him—but if one is to bathe to satiation in others' blood for love's sake …?

Belief would be marvelous if it were not belief but scientific certainty. But you can't go back and believe what you know to be false and no belief has ever existed without holes in stones that emit smoke—to this day. Belief must always for us today signify nothing but the incomplete, the not yet realized, the hypothetical. The unknown.

Where then will you find the only true belief in our day? Only in science. That is the realm of the incomplete, the convinced hypothesis—the frightening embodiment of mysteries, of transmutations from force to body and from body to—nothingness. Light.

The anthropomorphic Imaginatives that baffle us by their absence today had better look to Joyce if they want a pope and endless time.

Anyone who has seen two thousand infants born as I have and pulled them one way or another into the world must know that man, as such, is doomed to disappear in not too many thousand years. He just can't go on. No woman will stand for it. Why should she?

We'll have to look to something else. Who are we anyhow? Just man? What the hell's that? Rime is more.