Countries of the mind

the long version

Responding to William Carlos Williams' conviction that all poetry of worth contains "a theme greater than any poem," Countries of the Mind analyzes Williams' own poetry in the light of his poem "The Descent," whose opening lines, "the descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned," are taken as the clearest statement of such a theme in Williams' poetry. In this reading the Descent represents the change in values that shifts the focus of our attention from the demands of the world to the concerns of the Self. In following Williams' growing awareness of this process from the early verse through the later work, the argument discusses the descent to memory and to the unconscious as regions in what Williams calls, in Paterson, "the countries of the mind." In this context, memory is the realm of poetry, the unconscious region of that "love without shadows" in which the completion of the personality is to be accomplished.