William Carlos Williams’s The Dog and the Fever: Baroque Proto-Modernism as American Modernist Innovation

ABSTRACT:William Carlos Williams’s translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella El perro y la calentura (The Dog and the Fever), by Pedro Espinosa, is a major work in Williams’s canon that has yet to receive the degree of attention it deserves from scholars. The omission from scholarly understanding of this translation of proto- modern fiction limits the full appreciation of both his development and his achievement as a major American author. My essay examines the translation and its importance to Williams, his idea of modernism, and his epic verse.