"You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did"
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Creeley is doing that poet’s trick of sounding casual while quietly drawing a moral line. The surface is chatty - “you were saying,” “I mean” - but the target is sharp: two modernist archetypes, Pound and William Carlos Williams, offered as competing models of how an artist’s mind behaves over time.
“Volatile” is the key provocation. In ordinary speech it can mean unstable, even unreliable. Here it’s praise disguised as a risk. Creeley values a thinking that stays in motion, responsive to circumstance, capable of revising itself without collapsing into incoherence. That’s Williams in this framing: a mind that doesn’t calcify into doctrine, a writer who can keep making poems without needing every new gesture to confirm an old thesis about the world.
Pound, by contrast, becomes the cautionary tale of intellectual fixation. Creeley’s phrasing - “locked into a pattern of concepts” that “defined his subsequent necessary behavior” - carries an almost clinical chill. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about temperament sliding into destiny. Anyone who knows Pound’s trajectory hears the implied indictment: the turn from brilliant formal innovation to the rigid ideological commitments that helped land him in disgrace. The word “necessary” is doing heavy work: once you build a mental system that explains everything, you start acting as if you have no choice.
Contextually, Creeley is speaking from the postwar, post-Pound moment, when poets had to inherit modernism without inheriting its authoritarian streak. The subtext is a defense of openness as an ethical stance: stay volatile, or your ideas will start using you.
“Volatile” is the key provocation. In ordinary speech it can mean unstable, even unreliable. Here it’s praise disguised as a risk. Creeley values a thinking that stays in motion, responsive to circumstance, capable of revising itself without collapsing into incoherence. That’s Williams in this framing: a mind that doesn’t calcify into doctrine, a writer who can keep making poems without needing every new gesture to confirm an old thesis about the world.
Pound, by contrast, becomes the cautionary tale of intellectual fixation. Creeley’s phrasing - “locked into a pattern of concepts” that “defined his subsequent necessary behavior” - carries an almost clinical chill. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about temperament sliding into destiny. Anyone who knows Pound’s trajectory hears the implied indictment: the turn from brilliant formal innovation to the rigid ideological commitments that helped land him in disgrace. The word “necessary” is doing heavy work: once you build a mental system that explains everything, you start acting as if you have no choice.
Contextually, Creeley is speaking from the postwar, post-Pound moment, when poets had to inherit modernism without inheriting its authoritarian streak. The subtext is a defense of openness as an ethical stance: stay volatile, or your ideas will start using you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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