
Paterson
William Carlos Williams(Author)
Christopher MacGowan(Editor)
Carcanet Classics (Publisher)
Published on 30. March 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
336 pages
978-1-80017-361-3 (ISBN)
Description
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), like his friend Ezra Pound, never finished his magnum opus, a poem as impossibly ambitious as the Cantos, but richly invested in the present world. It was published over a period of a dozen years (1946-1958) in five books, the sixth left incomplete. The first book was welcomed by the great American poet-critic Randall Jarrell. He called it 'the best thing Williams has ever written' - 'how wonderful and unlikely that this extraordinary mixture of the most delicate lyricism of perception and feeling with the hardest and homeliest actuality should ever have come into being! There has never been a poem more American.'
He was disappointed with the books that followed. But he was expecting an American epic while Williams was delivering something more original, Whitmanesque, an evocation of a New Jersey community (Paterson), a great American river (the Passaic) that powered its mill wheels, a confluence of human and natural worlds in conflicts and harmonies. It is a great poem about humankind and the environment it finds, exploits but cannot dominate. The style has been called documentary, but that hardly does justice to its subtleties of tone and its American patterns of sound. Williams trained as a physician and practised as a doctor all his life. His double vocation produced a poetry different in kind from the erudite and culturally knowing and allusive work of his contemporaries. Its subtleties are of another kind.
He was disappointed with the books that followed. But he was expecting an American epic while Williams was delivering something more original, Whitmanesque, an evocation of a New Jersey community (Paterson), a great American river (the Passaic) that powered its mill wheels, a confluence of human and natural worlds in conflicts and harmonies. It is a great poem about humankind and the environment it finds, exploits but cannot dominate. The style has been called documentary, but that hardly does justice to its subtleties of tone and its American patterns of sound. Williams trained as a physician and practised as a doctor all his life. His double vocation produced a poetry different in kind from the erudite and culturally knowing and allusive work of his contemporaries. Its subtleties are of another kind.
Reviews / Votes
'William Carlos Williams, paediatrician by day, literary giant of the evening hours, is one of the great experimentalists of twentieth century American poetry, and this summer we can all enjoy a reprint of his long poem Paterson, named after a town in New Jersey, newly reimagined in this wild, invigorating, free-form, jazz-like patchwork of prose and poetry, whose language veers from the headily philosophical to the footloose and wayward.'Michael Glover, The Tablet
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 212 mm
Width: 133 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
416 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80017-361-3 (9781800173613)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Persons
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.
