The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams

This Companion contains thirteen new essays from leading international experts on William Carlos Williams, covering his major poetry and prose works - including Paterson, In the American Grain, and the Stecher trilogy. It addresses central issues of recent Williams scholarship and discusses a wide variety of topics: Williams and the visual arts, Williams and medicine, Williams's version of local modernism, Williams and gender, Williams and multiculturalism, and more. Authors examine Williams's relationships with figures such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and H. D. and Marianne Moore, and illustrate the importance of his legacy for Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, Robert Lowell, and numerous contemporary poets. Featuring a chronology and an up-to-date bibliography of the writer, The Cambridge Companion to William Carlos Williams is an invaluable guide for students of this influential literary figure.

1. Introduction Christopher MacGowan; 2. William Carlos Williams and the local Eric B. White; 3. Williams and his contemporaries Glen MacLeod; 4. Williams and the visual arts Peter Halter; 5. 'No confusion - only difficulties' in Williams's Spring and All Lisa M. Steinman; 6. Williams and politics Milton A. Cohen; 7. William Carlos Williams and the prose of pure experience Alec Marsh; 8. Paterson: an epic in four or five or six parts Erin E. Templeton; 9. Pictures from Brueghel: looking backward, pointing forward Cristina Giorcelli; 10. Williams in the American grain Ian Copestake; 11. Williams and women Kerry Driscoll; 12. Reading Carlos: baroque as straight ahead J. A. Marzan; 13. Williams, science, and the body T. Hugh Crawford; 14. Williams: the new poetries and legacy John Lowney.

Christopher MacGowan is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary, Virginia. He is the author of Twentieth-Century American Poetry and William Carlos Williams's Early Poetry: The Visual Arts Background and editor of numerous books, including The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams and The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volumes I and II.