“The old man”: Mimesis of Memory in Williams’s Late Poetry

This article proposes to answer the question of whether William Carlos Williams ultimately reconciles foundational antitheses of style and thought in his work in the affirmative. The author proposes that in Williams’s later poetry the idea of memory is key to this resolution: Williams resolves the antithesis between memory and imagination by the figure of mimesis of memory, overcoming an impasse between memory as a memorial of the past in “the old man’s dreams” in “The High Bridge above the Tagus River at Toledo” and memory as an enlivening of the creative imagination in the “old man’s mind” in Paterson, Book Five, III.