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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In his artistic development, William Carlos Williams offers us a series of enactments of the process of slow, laborious birth which he so often made the subject of his verse. When we look at Williams' career, we find long periods of groping experiment which culminate in brief phases of accomplished expression; the volumes Spring and All (1923), The Wedge (1944), and Journey to Love (1955) mark these major phases in his development. But the time of most profound change and growth for Williams was between 1902 and 1914. During that period of his early manhood Williams slowly evolved the identity that would provide the confident impetus for his later stylistic experiments. In evolving his idea of himself, Williams was most importantly influenced by Walt Whitman; the Camden Bard helped the Rutherford doctor both to discover and to affirm his mature identity.
1 The subject of Williams' relation to Whitman is a complicated one, which cannot be dealt with exhaustively in a single essay. My purpose here is to study the early evolution of Williams' poetic identity and to show the crucial influence of Whitman in that development; I have tried to work out more fully the literary implications of the influence in “William Carlos Williams and the Whitman Tradition,” in Literature and Historical Understanding, English Institute Essays, ed. Phillip Damon (New York, 1967).
2 See L. S. Dembo, Conceptions of Reality in Modern Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 48–80, and J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 285–359.
3 The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Conn., 1951), p. 148. Subsequent references will be made to CEP.
4 Walter Sutton, “A Visit with William Carlos Wilhams,” The Minnesota Review, i (April 1961), 312.
5 I Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal (Boston, 1958), p. 5. Subsequent references will be made to IW.
6 The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1951), p. 53. Subsequent references will be made to Autobiography.
7 The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams, ed. John C. Thirlwall (New York, 1957), p. 7. Subsequent references will be made to SL.
8 Yes, Mrs. Williams (New York, 1959), p. 3, and SL, p. 127.
9 The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York, 1950), p. 8.
10 Poems (Rutherford, N. J., 1909), p. 7.
11 Personae: The Collected Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound (New York, 1926), p. 85.
12 Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York, 1954), p. 186. Subsequent references will be made to SE.
13 The book is marked “March 1, 1913.”
14 “America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry,” The Poetry Journal (Nov. 1917), p. 31.
15 “An Essay on Leaves of Grass” first appeared in Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After, ed. Milton Hindus (Stanford, 1955), pp. 22–31.
16 “A Visit with William Carlos Williams,” p. 312.
17 “An Approach to the Poem,” English Institute Essays (New York, 1948), p. 68.
18 The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams (Norfolk, Conn., 1950), p. 7.
19 Spring and All (Dijon, 1923), p. 43.
20 “Things Others Never Notice,” in Predilections (New York, 1955), p. 136.