Enjambment and the Erotics of the Gaze in Williams's Poetry

There is nothing more difficult than to write a poem…. Take Dante and his Tuscan dialect—It's a matter of position. The empty form drops from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his phallus-like argument.

William Carlos Williams's 1923 volume of prose and poetry, Spring and All, created a revolution in poetic form. Emphasizing the visual properties of the line, the poetry exploits the poetic figure of enjambment, making it the site of the gaze, the eroticized look. Enjambment, the term in prosody that denotes run-on lines in poetry, will be used in a broader sense in this essay to mean the way the image is constituted by the poetic line on the page. Enjambment refers to the focusing of attention on how lines end and begin and, consequently, on what words remain together on a single line.1 It is along the enjambmental space, the visual and semantic turning of a line of verse (“verse” from the Latin versus, means “turning”), that the reader's own scopophilia—voyeuristic pleasure—is excited. This essay will examine three poems in detail from Spring and All for the ways in which they activate the reader's scopic drive. I will be drawing on an eclectic mixture of psychoanalytic material—from Lacan and Freud, to film theory, to feminist psychoanalytic revisions of Freud — in order to sketch out the way Williams's enjambmental form situates the reader at its center. For it is the reader who creates meaning by visually parsing a poem's lineation, and thus participates in a visually (versus aurally) grounded aesthetic— which presupposes an erotics of the look, or gaze. This scopophilia builds through the collection, and successively involves the reader in the will to mastery in several arenas: gender relations (poem XI: “In passing with my mind”), class