“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
by Herbert Leibowitz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 496 pp., $40.00
The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford
by Wendell Berry
Counterpoint, 189 pp., $24.00
By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959
by William Carlos Williams, compiled and edited by Jonathan Cohen, with a foreword by Julio Marzán
New Directions, 167 pp., $16.95 (paper)
If you look at the lingua franca of American poetry today—a colloquial free verse focused on visual description and meaningful anecdote—it seems clear that William Carlos Williams is the twentieth-century poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do. Why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?
