The birth of the imagination: William Carlos Williams on form by Bruce Holsapple (review)

Abstract

This is a thoughtful, admirable, rather dense book tracing the development of Williams’s thinking about poetic structure from his earliest Poems (1909) through The Wedge (1944). Holsapple’s discussion is not limited to the poetry only, but devotes considerable attention to parsing Williams’s often less than crystal clear thinking as expressed in prose, including the Contact editorials of the early twenties, A Novelette, The Great American Novel, the “Rome” manuscript, In the American Grain, The Embodiment of Knowledge, and more familiar essays, closing with the famous “Author’s Introduction” to The Wedge (SE 255–7). The book is a “developmental study of the form, structure and content of Williams’s poems, of how structure informs what his poems ‘say’ and”—here Holsapple quotes from “Against the Weather” (SE 217)—“why the ‘altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem’” (4). Of course, the poetry is scrutinized too—often with great intensity and grasp of linguistic detail. The tone is conversational but rigorous; that of an authoritative, experienced teacher. You’ll want to keep your copies of the Collected Poems, Volume One and Imaginations nearby as you read, for this is one of those strong critical books that demands we go back, reread and reconsider the work under discussion. A very crude sketch map of the book’s route would begin with the early material, especially “The Wanderer” and on to the “propositional,”