The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry

The poet as an inheritor of an Emersonian tradition, and Paterson as an ethical autobiography in progress.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) is the most influential figure in the development of American poetry in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. His simple language and focus on the familiar objects and voices of everyday life pulled poetry out of the past and restored its ability to express contemporary experience. Williams believed passionately in poetry's usefulness, abho...