Among the great figures who have led the revolution in poetry of our century William Carlos Williams was unique in his closeness to the center of American life. Over a span of fifty years he worked to achieve an idiom which would reflect the American rhythm, both of speech and living.
Williams was always the poet of "the thing itself," the symbolic object, a particularized reality. Where others may have seen the symbols of modern America as ironic gestures toward what might have been, Williams saw them simply as true things, and hence as important and beautiful. In these immediate terms he presented the life he saw and lived, with a vocabulary absolutely unaffected and in a metric pure, spontaneous, dancelike.
The original selection was made by Dr. Williams in 1949 and did not include any poems from 1950 to 1960, when some of his finest work was done. For this enlarged edition, 25 poems have been added, chosen by vote of a committee of poets and critics from The Desert Music (1954), Journey to Love (1955), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pictures from Brueghel (1962). There is also a substantial section from the long poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," which W. H. Auden has called "one of the most beautiful love poems in the language."
Did you find this review helpful?