SOURCE: “Axis of Passion,” in Salmagundi, Nos. 114–115, Spring–Summer, 1997, pp. 205–27.

In the following excerpt, Pollack offers a tempered evaluation of The Vigil. While noting the great achievement of A Dream of Mind, Pollack finds shortcomings in Williams's subsequent inability to balance idealistic and objective elements in The Vigil.

Imagine an axis, not of realism per se, but of poets’ degrees of commitment to mimesis. At one pole, the “empirical,” poetry is about something. At the opposite, “idealist” pole, it exists only to call attention to itself or to the mind that wrote it; subject-matter of any sort, from nymphs to warfare, is a pretext. Since the Romantics, lyric poetry has been inherently idealist—although Imagists, Futurists, Objectivists, and Brechtian constructivists have tried to subordinate word to thing or mind to world. Even Surrealists and Projectivists have attempted, through various associative techniques, to escape conventional modes of subjectivity and...