The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939

by William Carlos Williams, Christopher MacGowan, A. Walton Litz (Editor)

Considered by many to be the most characteristically American of our twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams "wanted to write a poem / that you would understand / ,,,But you got to try hard�."

So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, American, Literature, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Fiction

604 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Reviews

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poem was a note WCW left for his wife on his refrigerator:

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

[Selena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let's get past "The Red Wheelbarrow" shall we? William Carlos Williams is a god among poets and artists alike. Having spent his nights with artists like Duchamp and Picabia and his weekends with Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, it is no surprise. And yet it is rare to hear anyone singing the William Carlos Williams praises.

Art influenced Williams for lack of any other inspiration. I don't see in his work that he ever really separated art from the writing.

Reading his collection, which covers 1909 until 1939 - it is clear that Williams was in a growing phase. He was learning about himself as a writer and an artist. And of course, a physician.

I've never underestimated the influence that his technical training and work with children had on his work.He was playful but precise yet he knew how to be serious. He used words as words. They weren't to represent anything but what they were. They were concrete, palpable - not abstractions.

I read things in chunks - and it somehow made sense to do that. Considering that I am not the type of person who enjoys "collections," I was actually surprised at how much I drew from this book and relished in reading it. It never once felt like an overwhelming amount of one person's work.

What please me most was that Williams had shown me how to break my own rules. Reading his poems, I found myself writing on the pages of the book - circling words and making notes in the margins. I never do that! I keep my books pristine no matter the circumstance. But it felt right to make notes to myself so that coming back to the poems, I'd remember what I originally thought or the connections I had made.

As an aspiring writer and someone who dabbles in art, I see the nonexistent distinction between the two. It's all just blank canvases with different writing utensils. Few understand that.

[Ritinha]

Chegar a esta poesia 20 anos antes ter-me-ia deslumbrado. A ingenuidade, o optimismo, o vagar tremendo de quem vê a amostra e a toma pelo todo que dispensa gestão de esforços (e de tempo), a generosidade impressionável, tudo isso se foi reduzindo com o volver dos dias e o aperto das suas possibilidades horárias.

Com tais qualidades recuperadas esta leitura teria sido bem distinta, dificilmente determinante de mais do que a pouca vontade de seguir para o segundo volume.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

1914: The Wanderer; Pastorals and Self-portraits
1915: The Shadows
1916: Stillness; Drink; A Love Song; Naked

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, this is a pretty gargantuan task for me. Not only do I have to write a 580 word review of a collection of William Carlos Williams poems, but also, I have to do the exact same thing with the second part of the collection. Oh, and these are the last two books that I have left to review for SocialBookshelves.com, so no pressure – once these are reviewed, I’ve reviewed every book that I’ve ever read, or at least that I ever remember reading.

I suppose that the best place to start is with what was happening in Williams’ life at the time. He’s an interesting character, because he practised as a doctor, as well as writing prolific amounts of poetry. He graduated from medical school in 1906, and his first book of poetry came out in 1909, where this collection begins. In the following years, he had a son and became friends with Ezra Pound, another celebrated poet with an impressive reputation.

Williams’ work is associated with modernism and realism, according to Wikipedia, but I’m not a fan of labels. For me, I just found it to be easy to read and entertaining, two key qualities that I look for. Look, let me flip to a random page and find something awesome: “January! The beginning of all things! Sprung from the old burning nest upward in the flame! I was married at thirteen, my parents had nine kids and we were on the street, that’s why that old bugger – he was twenty-six and I hadn’t even had my changes yet. Now look at me!”

This particular collection spans the early part of his life, up to the outbreak of the Second World War. In this period, the author released eleven collections of poetry, and his style evolved over time – it’s interesting to watch it develop through the pages of the book, and there’s always his second book of collected poems to look forward to reading afterwards.

Really, one of the only problems for me is that there are often longer passages of prose that separate the poems, and I’m a big fan of simplicity – Williams was great at describing simple ideas and creating strong mental imagery in a small number of words, and so it feels like a shame to see him expand upon this. That said, it’s still worth reading, and I wouldn’t recommend skipping over it – it’s just that it’ll slow your progress, and in a book as long as this, you need all of the help that you can get to make sure that you keep on going until the end.

One final thing to note here is that you get your money’s worth – this book could keep you going for months, especially if you ration it or read it over time. My copy cost £12.95, which is just under $20. Easily worth it, when you consider how many poems are included in the collection. It also serves as an essential reference if you’re a student who needs to know more about the great poet, in his early years.

There’s not much more for me to say, so all I can think of is to quote another poem from 1938, called ‘At the Bar‘: “Hi, open up a dozen. Wha’cha tryin’ ta do – charge ya batteries? Make it two. Easy girl! You’ll blow a fuse if ya keep that up.”

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Given Williams’ concern to escape old poetic forms, he remains surprisingly indebted to romantic ideas.

[dmerey · Rating 4 out of 5]

« Kiss the wind when it kills you
Lean your surfaces
Against the frost
With your whole heart— »

[Cameron Cook]

An astonishing chronicle of one of the most brilliant poets in American literature.

[Marti Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

No es aquest. He tornat a llegir els 100 poemas perquè m'havia oblidat que ya els havia llegit.

[Natalie Homer · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This is a review for both volumes.)

William Carlos Williams is one of my favorite poets—my canon poets—that I return to over and over for inspiration, for pleasure, and for when I lose faith in poetry. His best poems are those that slow down and hone in on one scene, one main image—like a painting, as Williams himself thought: "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing.” I’ve always thought there was something of Edward Hopper in Williams’ poems, and of Williams in Hopper’s paintings.

Clear, distilled, and perfectly framed: these are the traits I think of for a Williams poem. “Nantucket,” “Queen Anne’s Lace,” “Between Walls,” “Sunflowers,” along with all his most famous ones—these best showcase his minimalist-yet-saturated style. Williams places the image center stage; it is the most important consideration, and everything else must fall into place around it.

I’m less interested in his longer poems, his poems about poetry, and his poems with what seem to be sexist or racist undertones. Women’s bodies sometimes come across as things to ogle and judge, e.g. “the flabby woman in / the white bathing suit,” “the bulk / of her thighs / causing her to waddle,” “I noticed: / her youth, her / receding chin and / fair hair; / her legs, bare,” “Because they are not, / they paint their lips / and dress like whores,” or the entirety of “The Return to Work,” in which the speaker admires two office assistants while walking behind them. I’m not saying all these descriptions don’t have poetic value in context—just that reading many of Williams’ poems back-to-back establishes a pattern of cooly critiquing women’s bodies.

Likewise, Williams has some poems that seem to tread into territory that might be racially offensive. Williams himself being of Puerto Rican heritage and living in an era where segregation was practiced, and at a time when America was diversifying, can perhaps be given some leeway. I’m never sure how to judge things like this—I’m sure academic papers have been written on the subject, so I’ll leave that to the experts. Sometimes I wonder if certain descriptions or mentions are done intentionally and ironically, as it seems to be in “Passaic, N. J.” where the speaker says, in what seems to be a very tongue-in-cheek way, meant to draw attention to the backwardness: “The n——s and wops on Tulip Street / have few prejudices, I none”.

Despite these two main areas of criticism, Williams really is a genius poet and is worth reading at any level, from middle school through the doctoral level. His language is simple and clear, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of poetic depth. Many poets before and since have not been able to balance these crucial aspects of poetry that Williams does so well: clarity + depth.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

You really need to read the Collected to understand Williams. The various Selecteds out there really don't do this remarkable poet justice (though the review I read of Pinsky's new edited volume of Williams was positive--haven't checked that out yet). Williams was not just an Imagist poet, writing about how much depends on that red wheelbarrow, not just a free verse confessional poet of the late books, inspiration to Robert Lowell, the one who allowed him and Snodgrass and Plath and Sexton to "break through back into life." Williams was a radically experimental, avant-garde poet who explicitly modeled his poetic practice on modernist industrial design, on Duchamp's readymade esthetics, on Cubist simultaneity and fractured depth and ground, on Transcendentalist notions of "notching the present moment on your stick," to misquote Thoreau, of basically "being here now" in the moment of the reading experience, experiencing reading as an almost religious act. He gave his whole heart and mind and life to the craft and study and practice of poetry, and is not easily summed up. Get Vol. 2 as well!

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had very high hopes for this. I've admired Williams based on things I'd learned about him as a person, and have appreciated some of his poems, but I just couldn't make my way through this collection. Somewhat problematic is that it starts with his earliest least developed poetry, which is clearly not his best, but as it went on I found myself liking his poetry less and less.

EDITED TO ADD: I've been reminded of some of his later poetry, and I think the problem is that I like Williams a lot, but that I prefer his later work, and that even still I prefer less comprehensive collections. If he were music I'd get his greatest hits, but I don't think I'd pick up any albums.

[Jon Corelis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential collection of a great American poet

***** A Five Star Poetry Book: Recommended for All Readers

W. C. Williams's poems are about as important to modern American poetry as the Rocky Mountains are to the American contintent: you can't get around them. As the reviews here indicate, he's still not to everyone's taste, but his influence is enormous, largely defining great areas of subsequent American verse (most of which however in my opinion isn't nearly as good as Williams himself.) If you are at all seriously interested in modern American poetry, you should have this collection in your library.

[Acacia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspired me so much when I first read this collection. Favorite (and I think one of the most popular poems from here) is "This Is Just To Say". I ended up making my own re-imagined version of this when I was 14. Definitely recommend C:

[Lake · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a 3.5. Should also note that I haven’t read the inclusions from Paterson yet cause they looked kind of dull and slogging but I will eventually, probably. Read very much off and on between other books, poetry and otherwise.

Another note of relevance and to be stated for all future books of poetry I might review,

Things I dont want to read a poem about:
-A poem, whether real or (especially) as a concept
-A big ship
-Fear of the ocean
-A description of a painting
These all are subjects of Williams’ poems at different points throughout this volume and it will not be forgotten or forgiven. Shame!

Williams’ best poems (to me,) with This Is Just To Say as an example, have an ease and lightness to them thats to me almost unmatched by any other poet I’ve read. Really beautiful and complete distillations of a feeling, an image or an idea, brought to their most simple root. Almost remind me of haikus at times in that way.

In comparison a lottt of his stuff included in this compilation feels so heavy and slogging and pseudo-“academic” in a really unfortunate way. I dont know how much of this has to do with the taste of the editor of the compilation, or with the goals of the compilation, or both. I guess it does do a pretty good job of showing an over-arching view of the poet over time, but at what cost if it means I have to read like 8 straight poems describing 16th century paintings?

Williams describes my issue with his poems in an excerpt from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower where he (kinda pompously in that unique Poet way and with a good deal more formatting than here) lists many great tragedies hes seen come to pass and then states

“But the words
Made solely of air
Or less,
That came to me
Out of the air
And insisted
On being written down,
I regret most-
That there has come an end
To them”

When he’s on, it really seems like writing a poem is as easy as breathing for him, and reading those poems is a true joy. Its a shame there arent more with that air-born quality in this collection.

This turned kinda long and negative but its still a 3.5 so I mean I still pretty much liked it so Whatever

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

so much depends on a red wheelbarrow

[Allen3459]

Constant source of new words

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't think you know William Carlos Williams from the few poems that get anthologized. This has been a very enjoyable and worthwhile read, with many poems I wish to return to. I rarely am able to say that about lengthy books of collected poetry. A deep sympathy and social consciousness are very evident in his poetry. At times I wanted to laugh at how opposite an overall read of his work is from the impression given of his few anthologized terse poems.

However, one thing that wouldn't surprise people who choke on the ego of the plum-taker in "This Is Just to Say" is that, yes, his ego is evident elsewhere as well. So there's a pendulum between a deep feeling for those who struggle and his own sense of self-importance. In more than one early poem he addresses his "townspeople" as a way of imploring them. I found this touching, bombastic, and provincial, perhaps touching because he isn't the least bit afraid to identify with his townspeople, to claim membership even as he seems to chide or want to guide them. The opening of "Tract":

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral--
for you have it over a troop
of artists
unless one should scour the world--
you have the ground sense necessary.

Another surprise for me was how much he wrote about the outdoors. He obviously loved observing nature and the sky features frequently in his early poetry. From "Trees":

Crooked, black tree
on your little grey-black hillock,
ridiculously raised one step toward
the infinite summits of the night:
even you the few grey stars
draw upward into a vague melody
of harsh threads.

I was totally bowled over to discover a fantastic long, seven part mystical poem that notes in the back of the book say was inspired by his grandmother. It has to be one of the greatest tributes to the power of a woman I have ever read. It's quite amazing. In it she is a woman in rags who can fly and transports him and in the end gives him over to the Passaic river. It is completely NOT what one would expect from the writer of "The Red Wheelbarrow." Here is an early section of the poem:

And as gulls we flew and with soft cries
We seemed to speak, flying, "It is she
The mighty, recreating, the whole world,
This is the first day of wonders!

She is attiring herself before me--
Taking shape before me for worship,
A red leaf that falls upon a stone!
It is she of whom I told you, old
Forgiveless, unreconcilable;
That high wanderer of by-ways
Walking imperious in beggary!
At her throat is loose gold, a single chain
From among many, on her bent fingers
Are rings from which the stones are fallen,
Her wrists wear a diminished state, her ankles
are bare! Toward the river! Is it she there?"
And we swerved clamorously downward--
"I will take my peace in her henceforth!"

It was then she struck--from behind,
In mid air, as with the edge of a great wing!

I marked almost three dozen poems throughout the first 236 pages of poetry in this book. It was enjoyable reading until I hit his landmark Spring and All, which is full of manifesto that I mostly found tedious.

Among the work included in the second half of this book is a 27 page poem called "The Descent of Winter" that appeared in a journal edited by Ezra Pound. It is arranged by dates and is a mixture of poetry and prose. I enjoyed this but it appears that he decided mixing genres wasn't his bailiwick. A flip through Vol. 2 of his collected poems shows that he didn't repeat it (with the possible exception of the book-length Paterson.

Overall, I enjoyed the second half of this volume as much as the first half, perhaps more. There were a couple of dry spells but they didn't last long. The most notable was the book Adam and Eve in the City, which is clearly about his parents. I've started to think of WCW as sort of pre-confessional, a desire to let shame have no hold on him.

In this second half I came across the poem in which he states "no ideas but in things." I'd expected to find this among his manifesto-ish ramblings, but no, it's part of a poem! I have to say I absolutely love the irony of that, a dictum (non-image) stating that poetry should only be concrete within a poem. It's a repeated line in one of his Paterson poems (a concept he was exploring for a long time before blowing it into book length). In context, it seems to be representing how the people of Paterson live rather than what poetry is supposed to be, though the poem does transition into his mind and him sitting at a writing desk. Here is part of a stanza:

the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists--
--Say it, no ideas but in things--
and factories crystallized from its force,
like ice from spray upon the chimney rocks

And then there is a visual dot-line break and it continues thusly:

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His thoughts
alight and scatter--

Maybe WCW is using the city of Paterson to represent his mind? He is definitely creating a complex relationship with it and I look forward to reading the full work in time. It's on my shelf.

Though I continue to be impressed by the compassion and social conscience in his poetry, there are also parts of his personality revealed that makes my contemporary sensibility cringe. It would have been hard to be his wife, I think. He has no problem talking about his appreciation of other women's bodies. One such poem is "The Return to Work":

Promenading their
skirted galleons of sex,
the two office assistants

rock unevenly
together
down the broad stairs,

one
(as I follow slowly
in the trade wind

of my admiration)
gently
slapping her thighs.

He also has moments of dropping language that we now consider derogatory into otherwise positive portraits.

From the last 10 pages of this volume "The Halfworld":

Desperate young man
with haggard face
and flapping pants--

As best they can
under the street lights
the shadows are

wrapping about you--
in your fatigue
and isolation, in all

the beauty of your
commonplace against
the incestuous

and leaning stars--

[Sanjuro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading a book such as this is meant to be a bit of a journey, but this particular journey was paradoxical due to the extremely varied quality of Williams' early work. When he is good, Williams is among my favorite poets of all time; when he is not so good, Williams is shockingly bland and even trivial. This collection contains the full text of "Spring and All," which is by far one of my favorite poetry collections ever published. As well, it is full of marvelous work, such as much of "Adam and Eve and the City" and some fantastic stand alone poems. However, Williams is known to have said that anything can be made into a poem, and at times, too many of the poems stretch this into bored musings. I would even venture to say that, by volume, the bland outweighs the beautiful; thankfully the beautiful is so great that it still elevates the entire collection to an indispensable quality.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Williams’ insistence on “locality”—its somatic awareness and physiological presence in time and space—seems to translate into a kind of myopia in which the poet focuses on things with a scientific eye, creating snapshots or home movies (Paterson) of verisimilitude that often make for abrupt, boring, barren poems with ragged rhythms marked by the “volts, jerks, sulks, balks, outbursts” and stammers of colloquial speech. Williams’ work is definitely an acquired taste, like Bourbon, which has intoxicated many critics and fans since the publication of his first collection, The Wanderer, in 1913.

Favorite poems:
SPRING AND ALL (1923)
“The Red Wheelbarrow”

COLLECTED POEMS 1921-1931 (1934)
“New England”
“The Botticellian Trees”

AN EARLY MARTYR (1935)
“Item”
“The Yachts”

ADAM AND EVE AND THE CITY (1936)
“Fine Work with Pitch and Copper”

POEMS (1936-1939)
“These”
“The Last Words of My English Grandmother”

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve spent several months reading the first volume of William Carlos Williams poetry (1909-1939). I truly believe he was an American original. Yes, his poems are often anthologized. This volume however goes far beyond what college English literature courses teach.
What makes Williams’ poems worthy of your time is that they are not cliche, trite, or overwhelming. He was a man of the people, and the people in his day to day life gave his poetry such depth and richness. His verses are as fresh today as they were in the early 20th century. Of course he was a modern poet, and a lot of his poems require work to comprehend. But his poems that are easily understood are marvels to wonder. For example, “The Last Words of my English Grandmother” is a miraculous work.
I cannot wait to start the second volume of William Carlos Williams’ poetry (1939-1962).

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spring and All ** -- Williams wrote the book Spring and All largely in response to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland with its multiple languages, literary/historical references, and variety of forms. But what Williams counters with are a bunch of Romantic platitudes and mystical sounding vagaries aimed at straw men of various shapes.

The theme appears to be a desire to have an imaginative relationship with the world. “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force – the imagination.” (pg. 3)

Art should do more than “represent” or “be a mirror” to the world, he notes. Those who write in this manner are “TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGARISM.” (Capitalization in the original.) Their writing is a search of “daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images.” (pg. 49)

He explains: “What I put down as value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from ‘reality’ – such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.” (pg. 22)

Good poetry is “a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstration the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depresses before it, that his life is valuable – when completed by the imagination. And then only.” (pg. 30)

He also contrasts poetry to prose. Poetry is related to the “movement of the imagination revealed in words” and the “dynamization of emotion” while prose is about description and accuracy. (pg. 67)

Now my thoughts:

This appears to be an essay on what makes great poetry great. Granted, that is an impossible challenge that’s bound to twist one up on knots. Like pornography, we know it when we see it, but you run into a lot of blind alleys trying to define it.

But Williams uses his idea of great poetry (my term) as a way to justify why his particular style of free verse is more “authentic” or “real” or “honest” than those writing in other formats – not only metrical poets but writers of prose. And that’s a step too far for me.

His argument is full of strawmen. I doubt, for example, if any serious poet would say that their poem is simply a representation or mirror of the world. (Yes, Hamlet says that, but he’s a fictional character.) Most poets of any age would say a poem is complex work in which the poet and the listener/reader interact.

Yes, there’s lots and lots of bad poetry out there. (As there are lots of bad hairdressers and hip hop bands and baristas.) Much of it is crappy, dishonest, unfelt, prescriptive, descriptive, boring, etc. Yes, most writing/poetry is not good. That doesn’t make mine or Williams’ any better.

Yet he associates his idea of an “imaginative” understanding of the world with his writing of non-metrical poetry. And in writing this non-metrical poetry he leaves the undefined others (metricists? plagiarists? traditionalist?) naked with nowhere to hide. (pg. 2) Their language is “demoded,” “empty” and meaningless (pg. 19-20). Isn’t that just the definition of bad poetry – metrical or not?

(And his focus on poetic meter is pretty naïve. Poetry is a rhythmic form and has existed in other forms and cultures without “metrics” such as stresses or syllables. There is Hebrew parallelism, for example, and Chinese forms that have a tonal rhythm. Repeated and recognizable rhythms, not meters, traditionally define poetry in all cultures/ages.)

His contrast between poetry and prose is equally unhelpful. (No doubt he brings this up because he heard people describe his poetry as prose broken into line.) A novelist can’t be moving? Dynamic? Imaginative? Achieve a oneness with experience? He should have let James Joyce know this. I’m sure Joyce would have appreciated this news.

A great work of writing rises above its meter (or non-meter). It rises above its “apt similes’ and “pretty thoughts”, and even its inherent dishonesty (art as artifice as artificial) to express something meaningful (whatever that means to people) that makes them want to read/hear it. And we can say that good writing is defined as that which more people want to read/hear. It’s really as simple as that.

If Williams wants to write in prosaic free verse, more power to him. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But neither is his work more authentic, true, meaningful, or imaginative because of this.

Overall, though, there’s a softness in his argument, full of vague words like imagination, emotion, authenticity, etc. But more than a cursory look at his ideas reveals a rather hollow mysticism to find that “oneness of experience.” What if you believe in the multitudinousness of experience? And in the end, he ends up saying very little in interest or usable substance.

As for the poems in this set: They are ok. Most are compilations of images with no particular point of view or direction, while the other more-famous poems are vignettes or simple descriptions of homely scenes usually larded with Romantic notions about nature and rebirth and mystical connections to reality. (Am I the only one to see the irony of this point of view coming from a Modernist?)

Most of the poems are unremarkable (in that I forgot them almost immediately after finishing them.) The poem now known as Spring and All (“By the road to the contagious hospital”) is by far the best (in spite of its Romantic platitudes). Red Wheelbarrow is the most well-known poem here.(07/17)

An Early Martyr and Other Poems – Williams (8/10)

[Grason Poling · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally, it felt like very little was at stake for most of these poems, and even with the little, WCW tended to leave them exhausted from building them up to something boisterous.

WCW’s best strength seems to be the opposite of this. Knowing his tendency for the over-wrought, the simplest of his pieces (which have little to no reflection involved) in this collection left me very satisfied haha. makes me curious to read his later work, but it might be a minute before I pick him up again.

[Brad Bevers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Decided to tackle the complete collection of poetry by Willams, one of my favorite poets. I'v read 2 or 3 a day for about a year. I would recommend if you are already a Williams fan, but don't start off here. This is truly complete, and while there are many gems, there are many that didn't strike as strong of a chord with me. The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart is a great collection book to start with, and where I first discovered Williams too.

[Morgan]

I'm not sure poetry is for me personally, or may just WCW's poetry isn't for me personally, but I'd recommend this specific collection for anyone with an interest in poetry from this period or WCW's works specifically. This is a well noted collection that provides an interesting look at how Williams developed his style over time.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Carlos Williams is one of my favourite poets, (alongside Gerard Manley Hopkins) for having such a unique style and a clear love for language and the smaller things in life.

Of course the famous Red Wheelbarrow and plums in an icebox are here, but there were so many other poems I had not read—

A joy to read!

[Mitchell McInnis · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't know WCW, you should. His command of image and economy of syllable are essential to any student of literature. And if you're one of those readers who thinks poetry should rhyme, check out Williams' work and see why that antiquarian view is exactly that.

[Sean Gaines · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an amazing collection of poetry but I can't give it five stars because it's a collection not by the author but a volume of his poems from 1909 through 1939. A must have for the poetry section of ones library.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Articulately, W.C.W is now one of my favourite poets.

[Manuel Molina · Rating 5 out of 5]

El poema del Asfódelo OMG