1942 Laughlin had founded New Directions with family money. Since 1936 the press had brought out work by Williams, Pound, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens, among others, and as the leading publisher of modern American poetry, it was the obvious first choice for Williams’s new project. ‘Thrilling material I’m digging up every day’, he added. ‘It’s a theme for everything I’ve got and more. Wish I had more.’
In the event, the poet needn’t have worried about his material. He had plenty of it, which – along with his full-time medical practice – delayed the book until 1946. And that was just Paterson, Book One. Four further volumes would follow – in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958 – and there were even notes for a sixth. Paterson was destined to be another of those American open-ended compositions, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855–92) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1922–69) that end only when their authors do.
Like Pound’s Cantos, Paterson is a great compendium of verse and prose, dialogue and description and above all quotation. Both poems are open to chance encounter. The difference is that while Pound’s references are both widely scattered as between the Classics, Renaissance history and biography, Chinese philosophy and the 17th-century English jurist Edward Coke’s commentary on Magna Carta, they were also highly personal to Pound, put down more or less as he turned the pages of a recently discovered authority. Paterson’s quotations are mainly of the vicinity – not personal to the author but selected to pique the curiosity in local history.
‘Paterson’ is both a man and a city – Paterson, New Jersey, six miles from where Williams lived. It was here that Alexander Hamilton established the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures in 1791, a private, state-sponsored corporation to promote industrial development that would use the water power provided by the Great Falls of the Passaic River. This was a highly political act. As a Federalist, Hamilton stood for the manipulation of credit and the concentration of capital to fund large enterprises polarising society into owners and proletariat – as against Thomas Jefferson’s Anti-Federalists, who championed agrarian interests and the rights of the states over central government.
As one of the oldest industrial cities in the United States, Paterson was correspondingly old in the evils of industrialism. It had the first strike and first lock-out in American history, and when its old industries, like silk-weaving and railroad locomotive manufacture, became uneconomic, the city was left with the classic ills of high unemployment and a low tax base. By exploring this story from a hundred oblique angles, Williams makes Paterson a more radical analysis of history than Pound ever achieved in The Cantos.