The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams is a 140-page paperback first published in 1917, this copy is the second printing of 1963 by New Directions. The cover has some rubbing along the spine. Inside the title page has the previous owner's name but otherwise, the pages are clean and unmarked and the condition is good.
Among the great figures who have led the revolution in poetry in our century William Carlos Williams has been unique in his closeness to the center of American life. Over a span of fifty years he has worked to achieve an idiom which would reflect the American rhythm, both of speech and living.
Williams has always been the poet of "the thing itself," the symbolic object, a particularized reality. Where others may have been the symbols of modern America as ironic gestures toward what might have been, Williams has seen them simply as true things, and hence as important and beautiful. In these immediate terms he has presented the life he saw and lived, with a vocabulary that is absolutely unaffected and in a metric that is pure, spontaneous, dancelike.
This selection covers roughly the period 1912-1950, being drawn chiefly from the Collected Earlier and Collected Later Poems volumes. It should thus be read along with Pictures from Brueghel which runs from 1950 to the present, and with Paterson, the personal epic which is Dr. Williams' major long poetic work.
