Complete Poems

Book Description:

William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume I reissued as a Carcanet Classic. `So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow,' William Carlos Williams noted.

The first volume of his Collected Poems is a vivid account of his formation as a poet, his time in Europe, his time with the big beasts of Modernism (he never quite appreciated that he was one of them). The poems are printed in the order of original publication, starting with The Tempers (1913) and ending with Poems 1936-1939. When Williams settled, it was in Paterson, New Jersey.

The movie Paterson carried his fame in new directions. He remains one of the most popular American poets of all time, Whitman's heir but with a voice wholly unlike Whitman's: provincial, particular, never quite settled. He is a man the dailiness of whose life (`the local') is the stuff of poetry, though he takes big risks of theme: `the urgent insurgent now' that he lives and celebrates becomes history; it can generate energy even from the past. Thom Gunn described this volume as `an ideal edition'.

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