The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
It isn’t surprising that farmer-poet Berry reports ever-increasing affinity with physician-poet Williams, the single first-generation American modernist who took his home ground and people as his prime subject and audience respectively and, so doing, spoke to the world. He is indisputably Berry’s great model, though Berry is a rural, Williams an urban, poet, as Berry verifies in his thorough discussion of Williams’ poetic practice. Williams formulated his own poetics in his poetry, and through his conceptions of the imagination and its work (which Berry saliently compares to Coleridge’s much more famous ones), he honored the great modernist injunction to “make it new”; that is, Berry understands Williams to be saying, to participate in the original work of creation. Generously quoting many of Williams’ best lines, tenderly confessing when he doesn’t understand Williams (e.g., Williams’ elusive “variable foot”), and referring to his own life and work to clarify what he thinks about Williams, Berry produces a work of aesthetics more than evaluation, of love more than critique. --Ray Olson