Paterson’s “Language Pouring”: Wonder and the Communication of Sense without Meaning

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2013
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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eng
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Abstract
In his long poem Paterson, William Carlos Williams struggles to create inventive and moving poetry without using trite language or accepting “meaning” - incomplete truth conveyed through always inadequate language. This thesis explores the ways Paterson’s speaker seems to differentiate between meaning and “sense,” larger significance that resists complete explanation. In the first book, the speaker introduces the physical space of Paterson, focusing in particular on the Passaic River and its similarities to a language that he finds to be always in flux, at once unified and endlessly disparate. Williams includes a plethora of reprinted and revised segments of historical accounts of Paterson. This new context creates space for new interpretation and “invention” of the events discussed. But in Book Three, the speaker identifies the process of working with written history as problematic. The archive which must have been so generative for Williams himself is here described as confining and silencing. The library signifies restriction of free knowledge, and the silencing of greater sense in favor of codified meanings. Neither the outside world of constantly flowing language nor the site of language fixed in books succeeds in capturing true sense. The speaker instead seeks “relief from meaning,” mining the generative capacity of unexplained incidents from Paterson’s history. Such incidents seize the attention of historical witnesses and later readers, uniting them in their wonder. Paterson communicates effectively precisely through its acknowledgement that explanation through language is always an incomplete mode of communication.
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