Williams, William Carlos (Vol. 2) | Williams, William Carlos 1883–1963
Williams, William Carlos 1883–1963
A Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, Williams also wrote fiction and nonfiction. His influential works include Paterson and In the American Grain.
Williams' most ambitious work, the long poem, Paterson, is closer to symbolism than anything he has written, if one excepts the "rococo study" called "The Wanderer" which takes for its theme the whole duty of the poet. On the first page of the first section of the first Book of Paterson he declares: "—Say it, no ideas but in things—"….
The subject of this long poem, then, is a town on the Passaic River, and is also Noah Faitoute Paterson, the arkbuilder, the maker, the poet, the person. It shows his development under the tutelage of the city's genius loci as Wordsworth's "Prelude" offers an account of the growth of a poet's mind, however different the presiding local deities and the acknowledgment made them by the minds they...
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