Four early poetry/prose books of the late William Carlos Williams,
republished in original and complete forms, appropriately by the
publisher through whom Williams found his American readership. All
early Williams is maddening, frustrating, mind-exploding - like
listening to beautiful material through static at an unreal five
o'clock in the morning. ". . . the thing (the reader) never knows
and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he
is. . . . And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all
interested. . . " Williams wrote in Spring and All (1923); and the
moment, with Williams, is of a singular intensity, mingling
experiential, fragmented cognitions with a raunchy, clear, American
idiom. ("Why man, Europe is YEARNING to see something come out of
America. In a soup of passion they would see a little clam. . .")
In Kora in Hell (1920) Williams in his prologue has some cocky
comments on contemporary poetry, including Eliot: "On (an admiring
critic's) filet Eliot balances his mushroom." His anti-novel, The
American Novel (1923) is indeed "delicious" upon second reading, as
editor Schott suggests. Beginning with satirical irreverence,
Williams made good, rummy mincemeat out of a nation of unappetizing
oddments. A Novelette (1932) is again a total fusion of Iris life
experience (as a doctor, husband, poet, etc.) moment by "eternal
moment." With a fine introduction and commentary by Webster Schott.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in
small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and
seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the
course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly
searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of
the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them
onward." The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the
interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring
and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject
is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in
America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the
challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early
work.
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