Hunting Down The Unicorn--On Williams' Poetics As Embodied In Paterson

Paterson is widely considered the masterpiece of William Carlos Williams. It is a bodying forth of Williams' aesthetics. In writing Paterson, Williams wants to include all his environment and world about him. In this poem, Williams chooses a different way from those bookish poets, both in content and in form. Against the mainstream modernist preoccupation with the unfathomable greatness of capital cities, Williams isdetermined to be provincial. Repeatedly, Williams insists on the "releasing quality" of local experience, giving it universal significance. In this dissertation, the writer intends to decode the poem in four parts: the form of the poem, that is, the mixture of prose and poetry; the beneath coherence under superficial fragmentation; the famous Williamian female principle and the wonderful uses of images.In Paterson, in order to better describe the reality Williams uses the mixture of patches of prose and poetry. He says that the existence of economics and poverty makes it necessary for poets to take up prose in poems. And he states there is similarity between the prose and poetry, which makes the combination of the two possible.Furthermore, Williams achieves another literary success: he makes Paterson's superficial fragmentation of a variety of materials beneath a coherence, that is under the circle of seasons, which maintains a sense of literary link and beauty. Women in this poem, as the city, also experience a cycle of improvement and progress. The female first appears as the goddess besides the god, Paterson, but as the poem goes on, women are no longer the complement of man, they gain knowledge, respect and purity as well, and they are the sources of man's composition and originality. Williams' masterful uses of images, in no way inferior when compared with those of Pound and Eliot, build a stable foundation for the success of Paterson. His combination of mythically universal and local symbols paves a new way for his followers. Paterson is an epic of American history, literally and industrially, an epic of local people and city. Indeed, Paterson is an impressive epic of the panorama of America, the past and the present. His great influence on Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg is widely acknowledged. Through this dissertation, the writer wants to prove Williams' success in poetic composition. His stance and standing-point are America-oriented and he believes and confirms that local American materials are still full of vitality and inexhaustibility. Hisattempts to use local history and language, to take up the mixture of prose and poetry in one poem, to combine universal image with local experience are indeed a hunting for the revival of local American literature, both in form and content. And at the same time, he bestows his poem universal importance by wonderful connection of universal image with local experience.