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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In the face of William Carlos Williams's achievement in Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain (1925), Paterson (1946–58), and The Desert Music (1954), among other acclaimed works, readers must find it inconceivable that the young and poetically misguided Williams could have continued to labor at the genteel verse of his medical-school and interning years (1906–9). When a growing number of distinguished critics find Williams's place in twentieth-century poetics to be “revolutionary,” it seems pointless even to imagine the young Williams perennially separating his life from his vague “ideals” of beauty and ethical purpose, and thus going on to become, in maturity, another Joyce Kilmer. To date, scholars of Williams's early work, especially James Breslin and Rod Townley, have revealed the psychological change by which Williams's repressed self became free “to re-enact fully the process of release and reformation that Whitman had started” and have shown, as well, that between 1909 and 1919 Williams underwent an “agonizing process of cultural divestment” as he gradually shed his belief that poetry was a sacred trust of moral idealism and noble purposes couched in truth and beauty. Sloughing off his post-Victorian ways, and immersed in the responsibilities of marriage, mortgage, parenthood, and medical practice, Williams seems inevitably to have been prepared to “weld his artistic and psychological allegiance to the cult of experience.”
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