So conscious are we nowadays of the extraordinary influence upon postmodern American poetry of William Carlos Williams—the second and concluding volume of whose collected poems has now been published—that it can be easy to forget that, during the heyday of the modernist movement, Williams was widely regarded as, at best, a second-tier figure.[1] Even Ezra Pound, who had known Williams since their college days and had helped secure publication for much of the poet-physician’s early work, made it clear (to Williams’s chagrin) that his old friend’s poetic career interested him less than that of Pound’s fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot. Indeed, it was not until the waning years of the modernist era—1937, t0 be exact—that James Laughlin and New Directions entered Williams’s life, finally providing him with a steady publisher and effective distribution, and thus offering him some hope, at least, of a large audience for his verse. And it was not until the Forties and Fifties, when he began to win the allegiance of a widely influential younger generation of poets—whose aesthetic ideas were, in many instances, dramatically at odds with those of Williams’s modernist confreres—that his name unquestionably joined those of Eliot and Pound in the pantheon of first-rank modern American poets.

And yet even to juxtapose his name with that of T. S. Eliot is to be reminded how utterly different Williams was from the man who, during both their lifetimes, came to be regarded as the very personification of literary modernism. If Eliot