description: "Looking at the sycamore tree, the red wheelbarrow, the butterfish, the flowering chicory, William Carlos Williams saw the "world" contracted to a recognizable image." His poems are acts of discovery in which, like Adam taking inventory of his Garden, the poet takes possession of his world as he names the objects which compose it.Though Williams' work received considerable attention during his lifetime, he has only gradually come to be recognized as one of the most important of twentieth-century American poets. "It is possible," writes the editor of this volume, "that Williams, even more than Stevens, say, or Frost, will appear to later eyes as the initiator of a new tradition in literature, the creator of a poetry uniquely American...." William Carlos Williams returned poetry to the facts of immediate experience. While in romantic poetry the poet often sought beyond or above the object for its meaning, in Williams' world things are themselves, signify themselves. While a poem by Williams lasts, the editor explains, nothing exists beyond it but the chicory, in one poem, or bits of broken glass on cinders in another, or the young sycamore between pavement and gutter in a third. The present alone is, and the aim of a poem, Williams declared, must be "to refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live."The essays collected here, many of them written by fellow poets, praise Williams as "a model and a liberator," demonstrate the ways in which his work provides a "grammar of American culture," and in themselves testify to Williams' continuing influence on the most vital poetry being written today. They reveal a robust artist whose poems celebrate the world, the poet, and the power of poetry itself."
language: English
title: William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays
titlecomplete: William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays
ratings_count: 5
publisher: Prentice-Hall