William Carlos Williams

Abstract

Williams's first book was the self-financed Poems of 1909, largely a pastiche of the late Romantic verses in the magazines of the day that saw poetry as antithetical to the modern, commercial, industrial world. Williams began to find his own voice with Al Que Quiere! For Williams, Imagism sanctioned exploring the contemporary New Jersey scene – “the local” as he came to term it – using contemporary language and stanza forms to match, with a pictorial emphasis endorsed by Imagist principles and paralleled by avant-garde movements in the modernist visual arts. Williams's poetry began to synthesize and explore these concepts. For Williams, the legacy of imaginative repression, along with the exploitation rather than appreciation of the native landscape, has produced a violent America divorced from the very qualities that could bring it direction and renewal.

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