Dear Tennessee,
I have recently been reading through the work of a lot of the most applauded younger American poets . . . These are the people who are being published in the literary quarterlies and are getting their books published.
My impression, after reading them en masse, is that they are simply decorators. They have a lot of technique and produce a beautiful surface, but they say absolutely nothing, and one gets the impression that they are afraid to touch real life or real human emotions and problems.
Your poems, on the contrary, have a way of getting right into the marrow of life. They are charged with authentic emotion and they tell a story which people can understand and identify themselves with. They are not slick in the way these other poets are smoothed and polished, but after reading them, I begin to think this is a considerable virtue in itself. Therefore I would like to urge you once again, and more firmly than ever, to put aside your modesty and get together for us a little selection of poems. Now please believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I think that the public is getting sick and tired of elegant poetry that has no content. I think you will be amazed and delighted with the response that you would get to a volume of your own poems. There would undoubtedly be a few snippy reviews from some of the high-brow critics but I believe that the real reaction would be measured by the number of letters you would get from readers who were touched and deeply moved by your understanding of what really goes on inside people’s hearts and minds.
—Letter from Jay Laughlin to Tennessee Williams, April 4, 1955 (Tennessee Williams Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center)
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Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III on March 26, 1911, and died on February 24, 1983. Two volumes of his poems were published during his life. The first, In the Winter of Cities, appeared in 1956 and then again in 1964 as a slightly expanded paperback; some of its contents had been anthologized earlier, in 1944, as part of an annual poetry series edited by James Laughlin (the founder of New Directions, and Williams’s preferred publisher from that time forth). A second book of poems, Androgyne, Mon Amour, was issued in 1977, sporting a crude if exuberant jacket illustration of a nude young man as painted by Tennessee himself. People who knew of the famous author only from stage and screen might have concluded that, as he merely dabbled in painting, so he merely dabbled in verse.
It is true that neither volume won for Williams a reputation as a poet to rival the fame that he had attained as a dramatist. Indeed, that would have been a feat beyond all reasonable expectations. By 1956, after the series of sensations made by The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee’s celebrity as a playwright was such as to overshadow that of any poet. Though his stage success brought him a difficult and sometimes desperate life, it was a life more fortunate than that of his poetic hero, Hart Crane, who had killed himself at age thirty-two shortly after beginning to gain public notice. Williams, a household name at forty-four, needed to be cajoled into exposing his lyric efforts to the “snippy” verdicts of an increasingly insular and academic poetry scene. Few reviewers would understand that this jet-setting icon had always identified himself, privately, as a lone and tortured poet like Crane. Fewer still would share his sense of poetic values, or fathom the importance of his verse to his writing in other genres.
Now, almost two decades after the death of an author whom many regard as America’s great poet of the theater, it may be easier for us to assess the meaning of Tennessee Williams’s lyrics to his life’s work as a whole. This book is intended to make all of his published poetry available to a general readership. Besides the contents of the two collections named above, many poems are reprinted here that appeared only in journals and magazines. Much in this latter category is early work, written in a relatively conventional and sentimental style; but there is also a great deal here that could be called experimental, for Williams always took risks as a writer. If his drama is lyrical, as is often said, then his poetry is also dramatic. In it he risks the same intensity of self-expression, the speech full of passion and honesty, which defines life in his plays.
◆ ◆ ◆
When some of these poems first appeared, eleven years ago, in a book called Five Young American Poets 1944, they were fallen upon and torn couplet from couplet with that special cold-blooded ferocity which is peculiar to the tiger shark and the saw-toothed barracuda and the poet-critics that hiss and spit in the groves of academe. It is all a long time ago, the excoriating comments have faded mercifully from recollection, but in the Spring of 1945, a few weeks after the Glass Menagerie had won me sudden renown as a playwright, I was still feeling hurt over the critical reception of my verse some months before. I expressed my indignation to Mr. Oscar Williams who was a fellow-guest at some literary-Bohemian clambake in the Village, and Oscar said to me, “You are very conceited to think that you can work well in two such different mediums as poetry and the stage.”
At the time I had hoped for some more sympathetic response to my complaint, but now I see the justice of Oscar’s comment, its honesty and its wisdom. To succeed truly in any branch of the arts you must dedicate yourself to it wholly. There are technical demands to be met, and in the art of poetry, they are particularly inexorable. I may have had the vocation of a poet, at least some measure of it, but I lacked the discipline and the craftsmanship.
— Tennessee Williams, unfinished preface to In the Winter of Cities (HRHRC)
By 1955, when In the Winter of Cities was published, Williams had built a dramatic reputation large enough to let him look back on poetic fame as a goal of the past. It was a prospect that he could now afford to give up. Ten years previously, however, he had still clung to a hope of making his mark through his verse. There are two obvious reasons why he should have done so. First, he had been writing lyrics ever since his adolescence. Second, his success in the theater until 1945 was far from assured. He cultivated poetry not only because of the poets whose works and lives he most admired, such as Crane, but because there were times when he needed to play the poet’s part in order to keep his faith in himself as a writer. It is possible to be a great poet whose work is dismissed, or reviled, in one’s time. On the other hand, it is scarcely possible to be a great playwright if one’s plays are not performed; unlike a poem, a play is only fully realized on the stage.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the young Thomas Lanier Williams (as he still called himself) was a schoolboy in Saint Louis, a student at the University of Missouri and Washington University, an employee of the International Shoe Company, and finally a graduate of the University of Iowa. All the time he was constantly writing and publishing poems as well as short stories. Towards the end of this period, however, the theater became more important to him. In 1937 and 1938 Williams studied at Iowa’s Dramatics Department, and saw two of his full-length plays produced in Saint Louis (Candles to the Sun and Fugitive Kind). In early 1939, New York’s Group Theatre sent a “special award” of one hundred dollars to “Tennessee Williams,” for several scripts that he had submitted to a contest under this newly adopted pseudonym. The recognition that came to Tennessee’s plays from that time on — shakily at first, but steadily after 1944, and then quite overwhelmingly — helped ultimately to decide the direction of his highest ambitions, away from the little-magazine set and towards the more popular and lucrative theater and movie-house audiences.
Even so, Williams continued to write verse. He wrote it in bulk, notwithstanding his excitement over the Group Theatre prize, and over an even more astonishing $1,000 granted by the Rockefeller Foundation later in 1939 to complete his play Battle of Angels. He wrote poems, just as he wrote everything else: compulsively, typing page after page and draft after draft as it came to him, and frequently revising what he had set down months or years previously. In the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which houses the largest single archive of Williams materials, thousands of typescript pages bear witness to his unflinching acceptance of the “vocation of a poet,” as well as that of a playwright and a writer of fiction.
By the beginning of 1941, Battle of Angels had bombed in Boston, and Williams’s future as a dramatist looked not much more promising than it had in 1938. In 1942, with no further productions in sight (despite a new extension of his Rockefeller grant, and the publication of several one-act plays), Tennessee Williams the playwright had for the moment become “a failure,” in the words of his biographer Lyle Leverich: “either forgotten or remembered as a failed curiosity” (Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, p. 438). At such a time, Williams could not help but recall that in the years between 1933 and 1937, he had been able to place poems consistently in respectable periodicals: not just college magazines, like the Washington University Eliot (where over a score of his poems had appeared), but established journals with larger local and regional circulations. The work of Thomas Lanier Williams had even appeared in national venues of some repute, including the prestigious Poetry. In 1942, the prospect of becoming a major poet may have appeared every bit as likely as that of enjoying a successful career in the theater.
In December 1942, having just spent months struggling with his friend Donald Windham over the writing and rewriting of an unlikely comedy, You Touched Me! (based on a short story by D. H. Lawrence), Williams met James Laughlin:
Tonight I am going out for supper to meet a publisher who is interested in bringing out a volume of my verse. He prints the best modern poetry and there is a very good chance he will do mine. I am polishing it up in my spare time. He is the editor of ‘New Directions’ and I could not be printed under better auspices — I hope we get along amiably at this first meeting.
(The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I, p. 424)
Laughlin impressed him favorably and Williams soon wrote to him, asking to “get together and sort of go over and discuss” a batch of his manuscript poetry when he had a chance. Nervously, Williams hedged this request with a reassurance that “it would be extremely simple and we would inevitably part on good terms even if you advised me to devote myself exclusively to the theater for the rest of my life” (Selected Letters I, p. 426). Yet three months later he wrote to a friend, “I found Laughlin awfully pleasant and there seems to be a genuine rapport between us” (Selected Letters I, p. 431).
A main ingredient in that “rapport” was a shared love of Hart Crane’s poems. Williams’s first acquaintance with Crane’s work had coincided with a radical change in his own poetic practice, as well as in his general conception of literature’s imaginative possibilities, during the later 1930s. It was then that he discovered modernism, thanks in part to a friend in Saint Louis, the poet Clark Mills. Williams veered from traditional rhyming poetry — couplets, quatrains and sonnets, imitating those of latter-day romantics like Edna St. Vincent Millay — into a range of rhymed and unrhymed, metrical and free forms, sometimes combining all of these (as in “Swimmer and Fish Group” and “Sacre de Printemps,” both published in 1937). This technical development in Williams’s poetry reflected many influences in addition to Crane’s, but it was Crane whose biography, as written by Philip Horton (Hart Crane: The Life of an American Poet), would resonate most profoundly with Williams. Crane was a proudly Midwestern poet, a romantic American model to rival the self-proclaimed “classicism” and Anglophilia of T. S. Eliot’s school of modernism. Moreover, Crane had struggled, as Williams too had recently struggled, with the difficulties of acknowledging and accepting a sexual attraction to men. In 1942, Williams won Laughlin’s approval, not only through his own singular personality and charm, but with his unparalleled enthusiasm for this figure. As Williams had written in a New Orleans journal the previous autumn, “Crane is so much bigger than them all” (HRHRC). Soon Laughlin’s admiration for Williams’s own poetry became a source of artistic self-confidence that would remain with him for the rest of his life.
In May of 1943, Clark Mills wrote to his friend: “The news you are to be in 5 poets is damned good, Tom. Laughlin is wacky, as you say, but usually he gets done what he wants. . . . I hope I’ll have a chance to see your group in the new book” (HRHRC). Laughlin did accomplish his aim, and in 1944 the “Third Series” of the annual volume Five Young American Poets was published. A manuscript draft of a letter to Laughlin dated August 14, 1943, records something of their give-and-take over the choice of poems, and of Tennessee’s joy at getting them into print: “I am satisfied with your choice of poems. . . . My faith in your judgement is unqualified and I am enormously happy over the publication. It will be something — well — you know!” (HRHRC). The selection of poetry by Williams was called “The Summer Belvedere,” after the poem with this title. It was preceded by not one, but two author’s prefaces. These were a “Frivolous Version” and a “Serious Version,” between which neither Laughlin nor Williams had been able to decide (both are reprinted in Where I Live, pp. 1-6; cf. Letters to Donald Windham, p. 68, and Selected Letters I, p. 455). To date, this would be the most substantial presentation of Tennessee Williams as a lyric persona.
Yet the reviews of these verses by a writer who was not yet widely known for his plays, and who had — at least under the name “Tennessee Williams” — absolutely no reputation for poetry, were few and harsh. The poet and academic Randall Jarrell was entirely dismissive (the notice may be found reprinted in his volume Kipling, Auden & Co.). On December 15, 1944, shortly before the opening of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago which would drastically alter the circumstances of his life, Williams wrote rather pathetically to Laughlin: “I have seen only one review of the poems, in the Herald Tribune. It was pretty condescending but not really evil. — as the View would have been” (Selected Letters I, p. 540). Even these words were premature, for the March, 1945 issue of View, Charles Henri Ford’s surrealist magazine, would carry a piece by the boy poet Philip Lamantia asserting that “The verse [in Five Young American Poets] is of hardly any consequence, and it adds nothing to the poetry of the new generation.” Lamantia reserved special condescension for Williams’s work:
Tennessee Williams writes two prefaces to his poems: titling one “Frivolous Version” and the other “Serious Version.” To begin with, I think the “frivolous” preface should have been titled “Serious Version” and vice-versa. He poses the most inane questions imaginable, asking poets “how they live” and “how they get along.” He then tells us how he won prizes for poetry in high-school, how he wrote poetry behind his employer’s back and how he knew poets in New Orleans, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Chicago. His naiveté is insupportable, and one begins to feel that he should have kept on winning prizes at school, should not have written poetry on his job, and should not have met provincial poets who inspired him to go on writing despite his obvious lack of talent.
(View V.i, pp. 50-51)
The comments of these reviewers rankled long afterwards with Williams, who developed something of a grudge against the poetry establishment.
Such a reaction was more than personal, for it expressed his already profound commitment to romanticism and bohemianism. In 1949, in the “Foreword” to a book of poems by his friend Oliver Evans (Young Man With a Screwdriver), Williams argued that
when poets turn into deliberate men of letters, we begin to read them with more respect than pleasure. Often we knit our brows. . . . That is a kind of poetry, and sometimes a very impressive kind of poetry, but how often are we deeply moved by it? Even more seldom then are we purely delighted. . . . When Oliver (I am speaking now as one who knows him) is moved to write verse, he sets down words which usually make an immediate poem. He rarely finds it necessary to go over them twice with scratch paper and Thesaurus, nor does he, immediately afterward, find it necessary to crouch over his typewriter and bang out a scathing denunciation of some other poet’s work for the reason that it might crowd his out of print or because it represents a style not flatteringly his own. He does not worry about his relative “position” in the world of lyric letters. (pp. 1-3)
And when Evans’s volume received a harsh notice of its own in The Saturday Review of Literature, Williams wrote a letter to the editor (“Loading the Dice,” Aug. 19, 1950, p. 24) in which he protested the whole institution of reviewing: “I don’t think poets should be reviewed by their close friends but I do think their books should be given for review to someone who might conceivably have some degree of sympathy with the general character of the work.” Beneath this critique, barely veiled, is the wound that Tennessee’s pride had received from the reviews of own poems, and that would still trouble him in 1955 (quoted in the epigraph to this section). Elsewhere Williams ruefully recounted the response of Christopher Isherwood, whom he had met in 1943, upon reading some of his poems: “I have an idea you would write good prose” (Letters to Donald Windham, p. 195).
Despite these blows to Williams’s confidence as a poet, when Laughlin invited him in 1955 to gather his poems in a book, he summoned his courage and was able within two months to make a careful selection and arrangement for what became In the Winter of Cities. An early version of the contents is preserved in HRHRC, annotated with references to particular revisions of certain texts, and bearing the title “The Hoofprints of a Little Horse” (‘Little Horse’ being Tennessee’s pet name for his lover since 1948, Frank Merlo). Other rejected titles for the book included “Those Who Ignore the Most Appropriate Time For Their Going,” “Poem to a Friend,” “The Weight of an Island,” and simply “Poems, Early and Late” (New Directions files; HRHRC). If, as a volume, In the Winter of Cities was an altogether more deliberate construction than one might expect from a busy playwright with a low opinion of his lyric “craftsmanship,” this is explained by some remarks made by Williams at the time: “. . . we must try to make it worthwhile if we can . . . . It will doubtless be the only book of poems I will ever have published” (New Directions files).
Though there was in fact to be another book, it would not be put together with such care by its author. When Androgyne, Mon Amour was assembled more than twenty years later, most of the selection was accomplished by the editors at New Directions, who were charged with the task of locating “all the Tennessee Williams poems currently on hand” and seeing whether a viable volume might emerge (Peggy Fox, New Directions file memo). Nonetheless, the sixty-five-year-old Williams did contribute several new pieces, as well as searching out some much earlier efforts that had eluded the first collection. The later work was distinguished by its literalism and its occasionally informal candor, qualities reflecting the confessional mode of Williams’s recently published Memoirs (1975). A jeremiad in prose, “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?,” was intended for inclusion but then cut. Presumably it was too candid even for this raw, revealing volume.
Everything in these Collected Poems, however, is to some extent a confession — no matter how oblique the poet’s manner of expressing himself may sometimes be. There are certain poems, particularly from the first book, which do not seem a great advance on some of the early verse published by “Thomas Lanier Williams.” At first glance it might look strange that Williams would want to collect such poems, seemingly still shaped by the moods and language of Millay and of Sara Teasdale (another famous “lady poet” of his youth); what did he think they could add to his reputation? On a closer look, they become far more interesting. Take, for example, these stanzas from “The Siege”:
Sometimes I feel the island of my self
a silver mercury that slips and runs,
revolving frantic mirrors in itself
beneath the pressure of a million thumbs.
Then I must that night go in search of one
unknown before but recognized on sight
whose touch, expedient or miracle,
stays panic in me and arrests my flight.
Before day breaks I follow back the street,
companioned, to a rocking space above.
Now do my veins in crimson cabins keep
the wild and witless passengers of love.
These stanzas referred, clearly, to the gay cruising that was so much a part of Williams’s life by the time he wrote them (1941). Their guiding spirit is Crane, who also wrote about such adventures in veiled speech, and whose poem “Voyages” is directly evoked in a previous line of “The Siege” (“whose reckless voyager along am I!”).
Williams elsewhere similarly used conventional, genteel rhymes and meters to make gay experiences “pass” as acceptable subjects for poetry, as in “Pulse” (1943) —
the lantern quickly snatched
from hand to hand,
the gasping whisper and
the touch, the spark [. . .]
— and in “Faint as Leaf Shadow” (1949-1953): “And then you softly say his name.” Williams wrote such poems wishing to express his own sexuality, as he could not do openly on the stage. Although the archives contain evidence of his efforts to deal frankly with homosexual encounters and predicaments in his dramatic writing at this time, he must have felt that he could hardly follow these efforts through to production or publication. Instead his public treatments of the subject were indirect, couched in the feelings of heterosexual or self-denying characters (A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) or else vented in pulp sensationalism and morbidly Freudian melodrama (“One Arm,” Auto-da-Fé). Decades later, having produced the uninhibited Memoirs, Williams would address a changed gay world more plainly in dramatic monologues such as “Young Men Waking at Daybreak” and “The Blond Mediterraneans.”
Still, some features of the older, more repressive social atmosphere had been in their own way productive and central to Williams’s art. In 1965, commenting on Crane’s famous lines “There is the world dimensional/ For those untwisted by the love of things irreconcilable” (“For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”), Tennessee wrote:
For Crane, there was no “world dimensional.” He lived in a constant inner turmoil and storm that liquor, which he drank recklessly, was no longer able to quieten, to hold in check.
. . . as for the love of things irreconcilable, the meaning of that is . . . open to varying interpretations. Could he have meant that his vocation as a poet of extraordinary purity, as well as intensity, was hopelessly at odds with his night-time search for love in water-front bars? Maybe and maybe not.
. . . Still there remains about him so much that escapes understanding. But his poetry lives and burns and cries out with indestructible beauty.
(Tennessee Williams reads Hart Crane [Caedmon TC 1206], LP sleeve notes)
These words, however overtly coy and diplomatic, voice a challenging expression of solidarity with his predecessor. Crane’s biographer in 1937 had taken for granted that his sexuality was a “tragic maladjustment,” and had assumed “the impossibility of establishing a satisfactory homosexual love relationship” (Horton, Hart Crane, pp. 78, 227).
As much as Williams himself may have come to see past the prejudice that defines homosexuality as a pathology, it is a difficult and challenging truth that the tragic strain in representations of pre-liberation American queer identity was in some ways basic to his vision of human experience. At the very least, it was essential to his art in its formative period. For, among other things, it supported his romantic view of himself as a suffering poet. Williams associated poetry with the pursuit of violent desires and impossible ideals, in the tradition of nineteenth-century Romanticism (a legacy discussed by Nancy Tischler in her illuminating contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams. The poetic quest was arduous and potentially self-destructive. In a journal of 1940, Williams quizzically described his “oblique” strategy for achieving greatness: that of pursuing “success through failure, failure through success” (HRHRC). The ideas of the gay man as a “failure” of nature, and of the poet as a “failure” in conventional society, posed twin obstacles that Williams summoned all the strength of his soul to meet and conquer.
He did this in part by fusing, and glorifying, the two archetypal failures in the figure of the “fugitive” that recurs in his work. In 1951, he wrote a poem titled “Orpheus Descending,” in response to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (and otherwise unrelated to the 1957 play of the same name). Its end evokes a vision of the singer as a heroic failure, or a Christlike sacrifice, in exalted tones that emulate Crane’s:
Now Orpheus, crawl, O shamefaced fugitive, crawl
back under the crumbling broken wall of yourself,
for you are not stars, sky-set in the shape of a lyre,
but the dust of those who have been dismembered by Furies!
Williams felt called to descend into an “under kingdom,” a land of things loved and lost, through a general sympathy with sufferers that was surely related to his own marginal place as an “invert” in his society. But he also dared to believe himself capable of returning from that underworld (if only as “dust”), and he strove as far as he could to redeem it through his art — whether in lyric, in narrative, or on the stage.
◆ ◆ ◆
I’m a poet. And then I put poetry in the drama. I put it in the short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.
— Tennessee Williams, interviewed by Dotson Rader (Playwrights at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. John Lahr [New York, 2000], p. 98)
I think he has more poetry in his plays than in his poetry. And, in fact, I would say there is a quality that I think is unique to him. It has to do with the flow of his language and dialogue: It has some kind of a poetic quality to it. I don’t know of any other American playwright, living or dead, who has it.
— Clark Mills [McBurney] (quoted in Lyle Leverich, Tom p. 206)
Poetry, or what Mills perceived to be a “poetic quality,” has often been recognized as a central element in Williams’s plays. One might go further and observe that for Williams, much as for his admired predecessor, D. H. Lawrence, distinctions in genre seem to have made no difference in the language or tone of his writing. Tennessee himself said no less, in the passage quoted above. The words that poured out onto his page took at times the form of fiction, that of dialogue at times, and at times that of verse, but they are always “poetry.”
It is best to understand this in the sense advanced by stories such as “The Field of Blue Children,” “The Accent of a Coming Foot,” and “The Important Thing” — a few of Williams’s many veiled self-portraits depicting young poets struggling to make it in an inhospitable world. In “The Important Thing,” two young poets announce their poetic principles: “I don’t care what the style is as long as they’re honest,” and “I think the main thing is to express one’s self” (Collected Stories, p. 165). Like Lawrence, Williams sat down every morning, day after day, to express himself. But for Williams it was no less “necessary,” as his character the “Writer” put it in the one-act play “The Lady of Larkspur Lotion,” “to compensate for the cruel deficiencies of reality by the exercise of a little — what shall I say? — God-given imagination” (The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, Volume 6, p. 86). If anything, it is this paradox that gives Williams’s art of honesty its “poetic quality.”
Among the manuscripts held in the Ransom Center and elsewhere, there is ample reason to look at the whole texture of Williams’s work as that of a seamless web of poetic self-expression. Often a series of drafts filed under a single title will provide evidence of a work’s metamorphosis from a poem, or a story, into a play. Corresponding examples abound in Williams’s published work. Thus, the stories “Portrait of a Girl in Glass” and “The Yellow Bird” were sources, respectively, for The Glass Menagerie and Summer and Smoke. To see this process at work in the poetry, consider how four lines of “The Dangerous Painters” resemble a passage from Camino Real:
The cry of “Brother!”
is worse than the shouting of “Fire!”, contains more danger.
For centuries now it has been struck out of our language
except for private usage, in soundproof walls.
In the play, the forbidden “cry of ‘Brother!’“ is assigned to the character of the Dreamer:
JACQUES [hoarsely, shaken]: He said “Hermano.” That’s the word for brother.
GUTMAN [calmly]: Yes, the most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory. — I don’t suppose it can be struck out of the language altogether but it must be reserved for strictly private usage in back of soundproof walls. Otherwise it disturbs the population . . .
(Theatre 2, p. 451)
The point is not simply that Williams reused material from a poem in a play, but that the poetic and dramatic versions ring similarly, making them seem almost interchangeable.
It is appropriate, then, that a question put to yet another “Writer” character, Tennessee’s alter-ego in Vieux Carré — “What form of writing? I mean fiction or poetry or . . . .” — goes interrupted and unanswered (Theatre 8, p. 31). The genre, the form, was simply a vehicle; it was less important to Williams than his honest, yet imaginative self-expression. This placed him at odds with the prevailing mode of poetry-criticism in his day. As James Laughlin recalled, “the New Critics came along, and everything had to be all these formalist structures — and Tennessee would just write down what came into his heart” (interviewed in 1995 by Peggy Fox, New Directions files). For the “New Critics,” whose great exemplar was T. S. Eliot, lyric form and style were the defining aspects of “poetry.”
It is not that Williams’s verse is really formless, but rather that the kinds of form most significant to his lyrics are only seen by attending the techniques of expression that he employed in all his work, regardless of genre. (In the same way, the “poetic quality” of Williams’s dialogue, which Clark Mills was at such pains to define, might best be illuminated through juxtaposition with his poetry.) It might be said that the best of Tennessee’s poems are those with the closest affinity to his “arias,” as Allean Hale terms them: the long poetic monologues spoken by many protagonists in his dramas. One of these is Val’s speech from the play, Orpheus Descending:
You know they’s a kind of bird that don’t have legs so it can’t light on nothing but has to stay all its life on its wings in the sky? That’s true. I seen one once, it had died and fallen to earth and it was light-blue colored and its body was as tiny as your little finger, that’s the truth, it had a body as tiny as your little finger and so light on the palm of your hand it didn’t weigh more than a feather, but its wings spread out this wide but they was transparent, the color of the sky and you could see through them. That’s what they call protection coloring. Camouflage, they call it. You can’t tell those birds from the sky and that’s why the hawks don’t catch them, don’t see them up there in the high blue sky near the sun! . . . . They fly so high in gray weather the goddam hawks would get dizzy. But those little birds, they don’t have no legs at all and they live their whole lives on the wing, and they sleep on the wind, that’s how they sleep at night, they just spread their wings and go to sleep on the wind like other birds fold their wings and go to sleep on a tree. . . . [Music fades in.]— They sleep on the wind and . . . [His eyes grow soft and vague and he lifts his guitar and accompanies the very faint music.]—never light on this earth but one time when they die! . . . . So’d I like to be one of those birds; they’s lots of people would like to be one of those birds and never be—corrupted!
(Theatre 3, pp. 265-266)
Just as we can see how this passage could become a Williams poem, it is not hard to picture a Williams character delivering the lines of “Beanstalk Country”:
You know how the mad come into a room,
too boldly,
their eyes exploding on the air like roses,
their entrances from space we never entered.
They’re always attended by someone small and friendly
who goes between their awful world and ours
as though explaining but really only smiling,
a snowy gull that dips above a wreck. [. . .]
Other poems sound like some of the autobiographical speeches in the plays, or even scenarios for acts, like “Photograph and Pearls”:
When I think of how the light touches him,
no more flatteringly in the photograph on his mother’s mantel
than I have seen it upon his living face
in the glass-rooms of pool and gymnasium where I first knew him,
I almost believe, for a moment, in his well-ordered life
that once crossed mine, perpendicularly.
I catch myself, for a split second, persuaded
that it might after all have been somewhat more satisfactory,
finally, not to have torn with such unmannerly hunger
at the coarse fibres of experience
but to have accepted, as he did,
the pacifying dominion of a mother’s pearls,
her simplicity and her decorum,
half in and half out of a world where the heart explodes momently
with outrageous demands. . . .
[. . .]
As Williams told Dotson Rader, “when I write, everything is visual, as brilliantly as if it were on a lit stage. And I talk out the lines as I write” (Playwrights at Work, p. 98).
Expressing himself as honestly as a character in a play, Williams found plenty to say about the cruelties of the modern world, and about the need for a bit of God-given imagination to cope with them. Through his art he always he strove to transcend, as well as to confront, the “things irreconcilable” in life as he saw and lived it. In December of 1936, when he remained under Millay’s spell but was also discovering the formal revolutions of modernism, Williams typed a five-page poetic manifesto titled “Is Fives” after a book by the modernist e. e. cummings. The unpublished essay made a confused case for a kind of poetry that would express both “a direct view of reality” and at the same time “a new and different world,” combining “exactness” with “inexactness” — “the wonderland beyond mathematical equations” (HRHRC). Williams’s “Is Fives” is a self-contradictory document, but nothing could have been truer to his romantic vision, at once acknowledging and affirming the contradictions of experience.
“Is Fives” clearly indicates the essentially dramatic tendency of all of his writing, even his writing about poetry. Struggling to articulate his idea of the art’s importance, Williams concluded “Is Fives” with a satirical, vignette-like account of the predicament of all the sensitive people who end up conforming to an insensitive society. Potential artists at heart, they forsake the romantic and bohemian dreams of their youth to live as married suburbanites (members of “the Country Club and the Colonial Dames”):
. . . they will barely be conscious of the loss, it will come so gradually day by day. They may even feel a little easier on the surface, and say, “When I was young I was an awful fool. I liked poetry and walking alone in the woods and once when I looked out of a high window and saw sunlight cutting in shafts between tall buildings I felt that I was something like God because I felt cold and pure and disassociated from everything that was happening around me and saw it all as a single vast and beautiful pattern as simple and positive and uncompromising as the verb to be!”
At this point in his manifesto, Williams found himself defeated by the effort of defining poetry’s value intellectually. Undeterred, he lapsed as if gratefully into the form of a dramatic monologue: one that is finally less a satire than it is, in his sense, a poem.
Near the end of his life, Tennessee Williams wrote a prose poem entitled “Goodbyes Are Sentimental, But —.” Unpublished, it contains a kind of valediction to everybody who has ever read a line of Williams’s verse, a paragraph of his prose, or attended one of his plays or films:
It hasn’t all been useless. Unless the box is destroyed the words that had value will rise again. Mine, all that mattered much of me except my response to your love, mostly that given me by those whom I never met: so many letters unanswered because the letter to you all was still being written: if writing survives, in mine you’ll find all my answers, signed with my love.
All my writing has been a letter to you — ‘you all’ as we say in the South.
(Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University)
“All my writing has been a letter to you.” Most of Williams’s poems bear out the truth of this. An “I” talks to a “you;” the conceit is most explicit in his poem “You and I.”
Who are you?
A surface warm to my fingers [. . .]
an enemy of mine. My lover.
Who am I?
A wounded man, badly bandaged [. . .]
an enemy of yours. Your lover.
Here, the “I” who speaks is a character, not Williams himself. Tennessee was a great impersonator, as his adoption of his nom de plume itself would suggest. Yet the poem is, in its origin and its end, an attempt at a true communication of personal experience.
The best of Williams’s poetry contains the best of Williams. His poems are like his memory plays; he could describe his relationship to them as Tom describes his relationship to The Glass Menagerie — “I am the narrator of this play, and also a character in it.” Being memory plays, they are also of course “dimly lighted,” “sentimental,” and “not realistic” (Theatre 1, p. 145). But in them Tennessee Williams expressed himself. He did so here, as in his dramatic works, in a lifelong struggle to represent the arguably unrepresentable truth (as Laughlin wrote to him in 1955) of “what really goes on inside people’s hearts and minds.”
Nicholas Moschovakis
David Roessel
December 2001