C. K. Williams Critical Essay | Critical Review by Brian Phillips

Critical Review by Brian Phillips

SOURCE: “Plainly, but with Flair,” in New Republic, September 18, 2000, pp. 42–45.

In the following review, Phillips objects to Williams's overly explanatory verse in Repair and suggests that the long lines are essentially indistinguishable from prose, and thus do not serve any aesthetic purpose.

“Didactic poetry,” Shelley declares in the preface to Prometheus Unbound, “is my abhorrence; nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse.” The poems of C. K. Williams are not quite didactic, but neither are they quite undidactic. His long poetic line often dips its toe testingly into the waters of the prosaic, and his inspections of motive and meaning seem more fit to offer moral instruction than to summon aesthetic intensity.

Too often, the second half of a Williams stanza devolves into critical commentary on the event of the first half, swerving casually from the fictional scene...
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