Doing so would provide perhaps an initial link between those writings of Williams and Coleridge which I am about to discuss, but it might also have the effect of making Williams a romantic, or Coleridge a modernist, neither condition being particularly helpful, at this point, in understanding either. And perhaps this is the legacy of romanticism to modernism and postmodernism. Measure carries the force of law and enactment, in the sense of a formal product of a law-giving body. Of course, carrying its prosodic emphasis as rhyme and meter, it is the regular, produced recurrence of stressed and unstressed words and notes in poetry and music. That is, Williams is seeking a structure or measure of language and poetry not correspondent to an ideal form or order, but balanced in relation to this world.
Measure is a structure commensurate with the relations by which that structure is constituted.
What I will pursue, however, is the idea that those relations are often scattered, disparate, though abundant. The answer, I think, can be found in Williams, but it is so elegantly and provocatively rendered, if not always simply, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that I can't resist being profuse myself and moving toward his essays on method , which are found in The Friend . Perhaps his clearest explanation of method comes early in these essays in an operative definition. That is, incomplete, still developing. Were things already figured out, already ordered, and intrinsically regular and arranged, then a notion of or need for method would not be necessary.