Long recognized as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, WIlliam Carlos Williams' Paterson is one man's testament and vision, "a humanist manifesto enacted in five books, a grammar to help us life" (Denis Donoghue). Paterson is both a place―the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of teh Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

Paterson (Twentieth Century Classics)

Literature & Fiction

WILLIAMS, William Carlos

Poetry

Penguin Books, Ltd.

Selected poems (Penguin poets)

Penguin

In his work as a physician, Williams had learnt the skill of objective observation which he applied to his poetry, examining, as he said, 'the particular to discover the universal'. Marked by a vernacular American speech and direct observation of the landscape and people of his native New Jersey, his poetry explores the 'raw merging of American pastoral and urban squalor. Emotionally restrained but rich in sensory experience, the poems were written according to the guiding concept: 'no ideas but in things' and those 'things', a red wheelbarrow, a group of trees, a river, convey the local and the particular with a vivid intensity.

Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)

Penguin Books, Limited (UK)

The build-up

Literary

Macgibbon Kee

Imaginations [five experimental prose pieces];

Sour grapes; a book of poems

Sour Grapes; a Book of Poems

History

Franklin Classics

This volume chronicles the correspondence between William Carlos Williams, a Pullitzer Prize-winning American poet, and his publisher, James Laughlin, the founder of "New Directions". The letters discuss modernism, art, publishing, and the writer/editor relationship between the two men.

William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters

Biographies & Memoirs

Laughlin, James

Arts & Literature

W.W.Norton&Company

WCW, A Voyage to Pagany. Novel about an American Poet traveling through Europe.

A voyage to Pagany

Scholarly Press

One of the most original and widely imitated poets of the twentieth century, William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) wrote verse firmly rooted in concrete experience and the particulars of everyday life. A practicing physician for more than 40 years, Williams worked in the idiom of modern American speech ― unlike his friend and mentor, Ezra Pound ― and his poems are redolent with a warmth and generosity of spirit. The Beat poets were particularly impressed with the accessibility of his language, and Williams's widely quoted dictum, "No ideas but in things," influenced a generation of American poets. This fine selection offers readers the opportunity to study and enjoy the richness and variety of Williams's early work. More than 70 poems, published between 1917 and 1921, include "Peace on Earth," "Tract," "El Hombre," "Danse Russe," "Keller Gegen Dom," "Willow Poem," "Queen-Anne's-Lace," "Portrait of a Lady," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," and many others.

Early Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)

Dover Publications

Heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," the poems of Spring and All express the author's beliefs about the role and form of art in a modern context. William Carlos Williams offers an intensely stylized set of exercises in reduction that capture, in his words, "the immediacy of experiences." Sections of vivid, sensuous prose — described by the poet as "a mixture of philosophy and nonsense"—alternate with straightforward free verse that explores the creative uses of imagination and the power of language. "Spring and All," the title work of this 1923 collection, represents Williams's first major achievement as a poet, and was praised by The New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. This groundbreaking compilation also features some of the poet's best-known verse, including the modernist masterpieces: "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie."

Spring and All (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)

United States

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Books by WILLIAMS, William Carlos