IN HER RECENT BIOGRAPHY of the mind of Robert Lowell, Kay Redfield Jamison traces the hereditary path of the poet's mania and depression. Here I want to suggest ways in which it is not just illness that can be inherited, whether through genes or a conscious awareness of one's past—as heavy as fate, informing one's future—but that modes of cure, therapy, or relief can also be discursively passed down through the generations. For parallel to the largely familiar tale of mania and depression that Jamison traces among Lowell's forebears is the less heralded but no less present therapeutic role that the sea plays in Lowell's life and work.

Jamison notes the effect on Lowell's father of his wife's insistence that her own nervous condition rendered her unfit for the mobile life of a navy wife and that he must give up his promising naval career. Jamison imagines how “Lowell watched his mother hollow out his father's will, cringed as she demanded that he leave the navy. His father became, as his son would later describe him, an albatross on land: ‘city bound, a stranger to the sea, a stockbroker with few clients and fewer assets.’” The father's subsequent decline into depression seemed inevitable. The need for the ocean in the case of Lowell's father was both practical and self-sustaining and without it he cut a lost figure. Historically the attraction to the sea or a sea longing seemingly has its birth throes in the experience of sublimity in the face of natural elements, be they mountains or bodies of water. But as I have argued elsewhere, in relation to the work, among others, of Herman Melville—a figure hugely influential to Lowell—a Hippocratic medical discourse is at the heart of the growing popularity after the Renaissance of what Alain Corbin calls “the lure of the sea.”

The predominant medieval, Old Testament, and Stoic imagining of the sea as inhuman, evil, chaotic, and a realm to be shunned by all but hairy-aped sailors remains an implicit part of the sublime experience. The emergence into prominence after the Renaissance of a more positive aspect to the oceanic experience was accelerated by its perceived therapeutic utility, specifically through sea journeys or exposure to its air, and as a treatment for melancholia, the early modern blanket term for a range of aberrant mental states.

IF UNITARIANISM PROVIDED WILLIAMS with an ethical framework around which he built his career as a poet, it is hard to imagine that Williams had no special interest in Emerson, the figure deemed central in influencing the democratization of the beliefs of the American Unitarian church as it moved into the twentieth century. I suggested in chapter 1 that Emerson is a figure of particular relevance due to his influence upon the modern form of the Unitarian church that Williams had such close associations with in his youth and that a consequence of the influence on Williams of Unitarian idealism is the establishment of a basis for better understanding the “Emersonian bias” that many critics acknowledge exists in Williams’s work. However, the reluctance of critics to advance the idea of Emerson’s direct influence on Williams is understandable since “throughout his writings Williams remains strangely quiet about Emerson.” Charles E. Mitchell, in his thesis on appropriations of Emerson by writers including Williams, cites his agreement with several of those who identify Williams’s Emersonianism, stating “that the parallels between Emerson and Williams suggest that Williams must have read Emerson more deeply than he ever admitted.” He proposes that

Mitchell does not pursue this possibility, or identify Williams’s and Emerson’s mutual relationship to Unitarianism, but as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, both factors are interrelated. In clarifying the terms of the relationship between these figures it is necessary to highlight specific historical reasons why Williams, throughout the 1920s in particular, would not have been inclined to promote the importance to his own work of Emerson’s example as Mitchell suggests. Furthermore these reasons will place Williams even more firmly in an Emersonian camp, for as Richard Poirier observes,

IN THE LAST CHAPTER I STRESSED that the initial stages of Paterson, book 1, was dominated by Williams’s expression of his belief in the redemptive power of the poet’s focus on the materiality of language over ideas. However, the overriding commitment of Williams to the honesty of his report, the very heart of his link to Unitarian ideals, necessitated that Paterson “resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it.” For the poem to achieve this and so stand as an authentic record of his life and the values that underpinned his commitment to work, it needed to reflect Williams’s struggle to maintain his faith in the efficacy of the work he had set himself. His continuing determination to find an appropriate form for the subsequent books of Paterson reflects his ongoing struggle to believe, and so maintain the path towards knowledge he had set himself. In this struggle, in dictating the character of his long poem, we see him questioning the hopes he had invested in it with book 1.

Book 2 of Paterson posits examples of the failure of people to realize any sense of value beyond their basest desires, a realization that is undermining the poet Paterson’s own role as redeemer. Klaus Ehrens’s sermon in the park to the inhabitants of Paterson provides the focus of book 2 and sees him relate his experience of actively embracing an alternative source of value. He has responded to the voice of God telling him to give up his money and so clear a path for the pursuit of his true happiness:

With the failure of his meager audience in the park to respond to his sermon, the responsibility falls back on the listening poet, a figure now dogged by his own doubts about such a role:

More and more frequently Paterson’s awareness and fear of failure dominates the poem and is only cut through by rare but strong epiphanic moments of recognition and renewed resolve.

PAUL MARIANI STATES IN HIS ESSAY “Paterson 5: The Whore/Virgin and the Wounded One Horned Beast,” that in the last completed book of Paterson,

The emphasis Mariani places on Williams’s intent to “de-mythologize, secularize” is useful but insufficient, for it is limited here to a description of Paterson, book 5, and hence to the latter stages of Williams’s career. The observation, is vital as a description of the poet’s conception of his long poem, but it must be applied to the work from the outset of book 1. Mariani also emphasizes a specific and fascinating aspect of Williams’s work, namely his suggestion of the poet’s “respect for the holiness of the world.”

The impetus for Paterson is the desire to marry two separated elements, the secular and the holy. Holiness, a word denoting a state or quality derived from the Old English word hal, meaning “whole or healthy,” was synonymous for Williams with the word “clarity.” Before examining in detail the relevance of Williams’s use of this word to book 1 (1946) of Paterson, I want to distinguish between this term and another with a strong influence on it, namely Ezra Pound’s “precision,” which he associated with the morality of a writer’s work. The terms of Pound’s influence on Williams, the aspects of his work that most strongly appealed to Williams, such as his association of morality with “precision” and “clarity” in writing, supported the ethical framework Williams had already established for himself through his struggle with Unitarian idealism. Williams’s sense of the moral imperative of a work of art is found in his decisive movement away from the didactic tendencies perceived as inherent in a Poundian devotion to a “precise” conveyance of one’s meaning. The greater importance of formal organization over the clear assertion of meaning becomes the key to Williams’s restating of the “wholeness” and “health,” or holiness, of secular experience, and a means by which the ethical validity of art can be affirmed.

IN THIS CHAPTER I WANT TO EMPHASIZE the consistency of Williams’s faith in the values he derived from his early struggles with Unitarianism, and to demonstrate how those values characterized and influenced the development of his poetry throughout his career. Of particular interest here are how notions of unity that Williams found attractive in the Unitarian religion are figured in his poetry through his obsessive interest in motifs of root, branch, and flower. By underlining the development of Williams’s use of these motifs in his poetry I will also stress the closeness of his relationship to the English Pre-Raphaelite painters whose ethos of truth to nature highlights startingly similar artistic and ethical concerns.

One of the links between Williams and the earliest principles of the English Pre-Raphaelite painters is an organicism that associates virtues of sincerity and authenticity with the maintenance of clarity of vision. Truth to nature was an early register of those virtues and a means by which the Pre-Raphaelite painters first united against academically entrenched convention, habit, and fashion. For Williams “no ideas but in things” became a call to arms against the enemies of abstraction and engrained conservatism that emerged out of a tradition he shared with the British painters, while Unitarianism provides the historical link between Williams and the ethos of this group of painters. Williams’s first experience of Pre-Raphaelite art came during his period of residence as a medical student in Philadelphia between 1902 and 1906 where he regularly attended the First Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street and became friendly with the church’s pastor at that time, Reverend James Ecob. The church had recently installed stained glass windows, designed by Henry Holiday, which can still be seen there today and are part of the church’s historically important collection of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century stained glass. As I will make clear at the end of this chapter, Holiday’s career as a Pre-Raphaelite-influenced designer and close friend of both John Ruskin and Edward Burne-Jones offers a fascinating parallel with the path Williams ultimately took in developing his modernist identity as a poet. Both artists forged their conceptions of modernism through reactions to and accomodations with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics and ethics.

POETRY REMAINS A PERIPHERAL ART FORM whose relevance to everyday life is not well understood. William Carlos Williams bridged that gap by insisting that the language of poetry should be the same as the language people used everyday, and in so doing he played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century American poetry. He believed poetry could show simple language to be capable of fresh expression and open to the conveyance of new thoughts and ways of thinking. Such was poetry’s importance to Williams that from the date of his first publication in 1909 to his last in 1962, most of his life as a writer existed in tandem with his full-time career as a pediatrician serving the environs of Rutherford, Passaic, and Paterson, New Jersey. In 1948, soon after retiring from his medical practice, he suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes that for the next fifteen years forced him to fight to complete his other life-work of writing poetry. The social relevance of pediatrics, unlike poetry, needs no explanation, and yet Williams fought tooth and nail to outlast both the demands of his medical career and the illnesses that threatened to silence him, so he could finish saying all he felt he had in him to say. My purpose in this book is to achieve a better understanding of what compelled Williams to make poetry so central to his life and what hopes he had for it. Why did poetry matter to him and why should it still matter to others? In offering answers to these questions I look at the ethics that informed Williams’s poetry throughout his life, and I do so first by attending to the impact of Williams’s religious background, which is mostly ignored in studies of his life and work. Both Williams and his brother Edgar were raised as Unitarians by their parents, and William remained loyal to and supportive of the religion until his death, while continuing to denounce religions that looked beyond earthly reality and instead held out the promise of heaven as the real goal of life.

The link between Williams and Unitarianism also allows me to address a central concern of this book, the Emersonian nature of Williams’s writing.

IN 1906 WILLIAMS EXPRESSED HIS HATRED FOR “this medieval conception of a divine power with frowning brows who swats us one when we get in a dark corner,” an observation later echoed in his condemnations of the “Bible damnation theorem” with its postponement of “perfectibility to ‘heaven’ and all that heaven implies.” For Williams his stance against religion was part of his resistance to anything that acted as a barrier to valuing temporal and contemporary reality. Such statements have reinforced a critical consensus on Williams’s secular worldview, while the few commentaries that mention his religious background follow Mike Weaver’s argument that Williams’s creativity stemmed from his negotiation of the opposed temperament of his parents. Williams’s “volatile personality” is seen to be derived “from his mother,” the defeated romantic, equated with passion and a susceptibility to more extreme religious experiences such as her local renown as a medium. Meanwhile, his father represented the way “of reason, of Darwinian science and Unitarian faith.” In fact, those divisions are less stark, for as Williams’s autobiography indicates both his mother and father attended the spiritualist meetings at which Elena sometimes acted as a medium, while both were actively involved in later founding and helping to run the local Unitarian church. Elena’s involvement in town affairs was less apparant than Williams’s father’s, since she spoke little English. William George Williams was an excellent Spanish speaker, and so Spanish and French were more commonly used in the household than English when Williams and his brother were growing up. Elena’s limited English initially restricted her ability to involve herself directly in the goings on of the town, but her presence in the Unitarian church was felt in other ways. While William George acted as superintendant of the church Sunday school for nearly twenty years she played the piano regularly, an instrument that, among the congregation and to this day, remains synonomous with her. The differences of temperament between Williams’s parents are certainly important, and I will return to consider them in this chapter, but one consequence of Weaver’s argument has been to lessen the attention paid to the importance of Unitarianism to Williams despite it’s being the one religion he was prepared to defend throughout his life.

STUDYING THE NATURE AND ORIGINS of the “moral question” that Williams felt was at the heart of his modernist concern with language brings to the fore the question of what comparable legacy this offers in terms of the role special attention to language can play in reviving the health of contemporary habits of thought. Ironically, given Williams’s at timesentrenched opposition to academic specializations of knowledge, Robert Scholes argues that the impact of language awareness, and the absence of it, on our capacity for independent thought and judgment places a practical value on literary or textual studies. In offering Scholes’s argument as an analogy for Williams’s own justification for the practical basis of his art, I want to quote Scholes’s summary of his position:

As I have suggested, for Williams, as for Emerson, language was both a problem and a solution to its own problem, and Scholes echoes the same concerns when he draws on a variety of poststructuralist theories to illustrate a connection between what he calls a “material thing” such as an utterance or a text, and an “immaterial thing.”

MADNESS AS BOTH A BLANKET DESCRIPTION for a host of abnormal mental states and the way in which these states are perceived by the sane, has been a recurrent presence in Pynchon's work throughout his career. His fiction of the 1960s and 70s established a particularly powerful and enduring association with paranoia, while Pynchon's novel, Vineland (1990), saw Zoyd Wheeler struggling to assume a post-radical state of socialized normalcy in the Reagan era through receipt of a “mental disability check.” The novel opens with Zoyd contemplating the fact that “unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits” (3). Abnormal mental states, sometimes even madness, become identified with the sea in Pynchon's novels beginning with The Crying of Lot 49 and reaching a novel-length thematic in Mason & Dixon. The symbolic identification of madness and the sea that Pynchon plays upon is in part informed by romanticism and concepts of the sublime, in which the spectacle of nature offers man a means of affirming the interconnection between selfhood and Godhead. But more influential is a longer and specifically American tradition that Pynchon is well aware of and subsequently brings to the fore in Mason & Dixon, a tradition linking madness, divine election, and national selfhood.