7KH(DUO\&DUHHURI:LOOLDP&DUORV:LOOLDPV$&ULWLFDO)DFVLPLOH(GLWLRQ

RI+LV8QFROOHFWHG3URVHDQG0DQXVFULSWV,QWURGXFWLRQ
(ULF:KLWH

:LOOLDP&DUORV:LOOLDPV5HYLHZ9ROXPH1XPEHUV6SULQJ)DOO
SS[L$UWLFOH
3XEOLVKHGE\3HQQ6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
'2,ZFZ

)RUDGGLWLRQDOLQIRUPDWLRQDERXWWKLVDUWLFOH
KWWSVPXVHMKXHGXDUWLFOH

Access provided by Boston University Libraries (10 Aug 2016 23:36 GMT)

The Early Career of William Carlos Williams: A

Critical Facsimile Edition of His Uncollected
Prose and Manuscripts
Introduction
Eric White
OXFORD BROOKES UNIVERSITY

proclamations that punctuate William Carlos Williamss

earliest prose have become well-known to critics of modernism: outbursts such as nothing is good save the new (I
23),Rhyme was a language once, but now it is a lie (EC 58) and I am in the
field against the stupidity of the critics writing in this country about poetry today
(EC 62) became weapons with which he attacked his enemies, and clarion calls
with which he rallied his allies.1 Although they are conspicuous in accounts of
modernist versification, early polemics such as these can sometimes overshadow
the subtle, sophisticated and intensely self-critical discussions of avant-garde poetics that Williams conducted in the first decade of his literary career. Indeed,
Williams specialists have long argued that his early prose not only reveals rich
insights into his evolution as a poet, but also helped establish him as a major interlocutor in global debates about modernist aesthetics. Since Theodora Rapp
Graham and Emily Mitchell Wallace founded The William Carlos Williams Newsletter in 1975, The William Carlos Williams Review (as it became in 1980) has
consistently turned its attention to the formative stages of Williamss genre-spanning career. Reproductions of his early letters, poems, manuscripts, and essays
have provided scholars with new ways of thinking about Williamss local roots
and international ambitions for almost four decades.2 This Thirtieth Anniversary
Number of the Review seeks to commemorate this tradition by gathering together
and examining the forgotten prose works that Williams produced in the buildup to the composition of Spring and All (1923)his most cogent synthesis of his
he

xi
William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 30 nos. 1-2, Spring-Fall 2013 Texas Tech University Press

 xii

William Carlos Williams Review

early poeticsbut which have remained uncollected or unknown until now.3 Its
ambition is to help answer a question that Williams posed in his breakthrough
1914 poem The Wanderer: A Rococo Study: How shall I be a mirror to this
modernity? (CP1 28).
The facsimile edition that forms the centerpiece of The Early Career of William
Carlos Williams begins this task with a chronological presentation of the published essays, translations, short stories and multimodal works excluded from Williamss standard prose collections, as they originally appeared. It also publishes
for the first time previously-unknown essays, manifestos, and poems, as well as
original and complete versions of early manuscripts that have appeared in various
forms over the years. Essays by Gabriele Hayden, Christopher MacGowan, Randy
Ploog, and Erin Templeton provide a critical framework for this formative body of
work. Their articles shed important new light on the under-explored literary-historical contexts and neglected dramatis personae that made crucial but frequently
overlooked contributions to Williamss development. Ploog, Nancy Kuhl and
James Maynard also give valuable insights into the archival collections that house
most of the pieces presented in this collection. And in the pages that follow, I will
outline the rationale and editorial principles used to assemble this critical facsimile edition, tracing the network of ideas and methods that connect this astonishingly varied, and in some cases, highly experimental body of work. Throughout,
I argue that the heterogeneity and marginal status of these previously-uncollected
pieces embody the intricate designs of Williamss modernist project. When
brought together as a collection, the mirror that his early prose holds up to modernity creates a dazzling, if sometimes bewildering array of reflective surfaces
that captures perfectly the disjunctive energies of Williamss time.
The Early Career of William Carlos Williams was initially conceived as a scholarly convenience that gathered his elusive formative texts in one location with the
ambition of reviving critical interest in them. However, as work on the edition
progressed, correcting the uncollected status of these early prose works eventually became less important than understanding the reasons for that status, and
indeed, the impact that their inaccessibility has had on studies of Williamss early
career. As Williams himself noted, much of the interest in his early prose (and especially in the Prologue to Kora in Hell) concerned his relationships with other
canonical modernists (see IW 30). Compared to Prologue and some of his later
collections of prose, the references in some of the early works were relatively
obscure, and therefore, perhaps of less interest to his publishers and editors (or
indeed, to himself). But other factors, such as the methodologies, lexis, and publishing contexts of these works must also be taken into account when considering
their exclusion from his major prose collections. Some pieces, such as Belly

WHITE

Introduction

Music, were strewn with expletives, or, like A Maker, were so context-specific
that non-specialist readers would have struggled to identify his points of reference. In the fictional works, questions of thematic repetition (for example the
doctor narratives of Three Professional Studies) or originality (especially in his
translation work) and problems of categorization might have posed other difficulties. And some may simply have been overlooked, or forgotten entirely. Robin
Schulze has described selection pressures such as these as key factors in the
production of literary collections (Moore 13). By recovering the lost pieces and
contexts of Williamss prose oeuvre presents, we not only gain valuable insights
into the selection pressures that shaped his early publications, but also into his
early poeticsand, more broadly, the ways in which his mutable position in the
canons of literary modernism has evolved.
Williams has been portrayed in various studies as both a geographically located, culturally nationalist American modernist and as a member of various
transnational avant-gardes. Prose extracts from well-known early works such as
Prologue and Spring and All have been enlisted to support each categorization,
but of course, Williams would be equally at home in either category.4 What the
lesser-known uncollected works reveal is how richly interdependent his investment in both local and international spheres were, and how difficult, provisional
and sometimes obscure his attempts to locate his own literary position became.
What binds together this collection together, then, are precisely those factors
which have kept these Janus-faced works on the margins of modernist scholarship. Williamss writing in the Uncollected Prose 1916-23 section of The Early
Career is both unabashedly site-specific and relentlessly outward-looking, responding to the concerns and publishing contexts of the specialized networks of
journals in which he published, in his own backyard and overseas. These little
magazines and the debates that they catalyzed surface frequently in the work
presented in this edition, providing the reader with his wide-ranging or detailed,
detached or intensely partisan insights into the evolution of the modernist transatlantic. At times, the facsimile presentation allows fragments of those conversations to overlap quite literally with Williamss own writingfor example, in his
two contributions to The Reader Critic for The Little Review (EC 44, 83-84).
However, this facsimile presentation becomes especially valuable when exploring his more private literary experiments.
The works presented in the Early Manuscripts c. 1906-16 and Manuscripts
c. 1919-21 sections are as relevant to Williamss oeuvre and milieu as any he
eventually published, but like his 1924 typescript Rome, Williams also used these
pieces to push his writing into more extreme textual and intellectual territory. In
particular, the surviving examples of Williamss earliest literary prose manuscripts

xiii

 xiv

William Carlos Williams Review

offer crucial insights into how rapidly he formulated the most radical aspects of
his modernist project. With the exception of the Five Philosophical Essays (19101915) collected in The Embodiment of Knowledge, this facsimile edition presents
complete versions of all those known texts together for the first time. Together,
Tatters and VortexWilliam Carlos Williams anticipate the multimodal, improvisational prose styles of Kora in Hell: Improvisations, The Great American
Novel, Spring and All, The Descent of Winter, and even Paterson, while Speech
Rhythm previews the more technical treatises on poetics that he composed later
in his career. As his private reflections on his European travels in Tatters shift to
technical engagements with his peers in Speech Rhythm and VortexWilliam
Carlos Williams, these early manuscripts also chart his development from a private experimentalist to an international exponent of New World avant-garde
praxes, often within the same document. Moreover, the earliest pieces remind us
that Williams was a genre-spanning writer well before the appearance of his first
literary prose in The Egoist in 1916 (the year he began composing the Improvisations; see Holsapple 81-84, 120).
Although it has been scarcely noticed by Williams scholarship, Tatters is
perhaps the most crucial document of the three works in Early Manuscripts ca.
1906-16. In 2002, Virginia M. Wright-Peterson collected seven of its nine pages
in her edition of Williamss 1909 Poems under their archival title Notes from
European Trip. Williams departed for that trip on 23 July 1909 following a
string of personal, professional, and creative upheavals, and returned home to
Rutherford, New Jersey on 4 June 1910.5 The first five pages were composed between 1910-1912 following his return, while the final four were probably composed during his year abroad, with a final attempt to edit the work in 1916 (Willis
89). The present edition restores the two pages missing from the 2002 presentation (EC 1-2) and the archival sequence of Tatters, which Patricia Willis originally arranged based on convincing material and textual evidence (Willis 89-90).
Furthermore, it reinstates the manuscripts original title (EC 1), which Williams
also used to describe the genre-defying fragments, or tatters, in the typescript
(4). In its present sequence, Tatters not only reconstructs geographical and cultural journeysit also restores personal and thematic ones.6
As I have argued elsewhere, Tatters contains the building blocks of Williamss early poetics. The work draws equally upon his preoccupation with Romantic lyrics and his emerging improvisational mode, which favored paratactical
association and unexpected shifts in tone, context and perspective over conventional narrative strategies (White 60-65). But Tatters remains a resolutely provisional text, as it conspicuously lacks (though it tentatively suggests) the strict
typographical orders of his later multi-genre works, and bears traces of Williamss

WHITE

Introduction

editorial dissatisfaction throughout (see especially EC 7-8). Nevertheless, like the

Prologue to Kora in Hell, Tatters oscillates between the interior realms of the
self and Williamss engagements with associates, intimates and artistic forebears,
beginning in his own backyard before branching out into Europe. On the first
page he forms an aesthetic alliance with J.H.W., who was probably the painter
John Wilson, a failed artist who Williams befriended at college in Philadelphia,
and who painted version after version of the same landscape (Mariani 40). But
as he rails against the forces that thwart the culturally marginalizedfrom the
mad poet who wrote Die Irren (translated by Roy Temple House and published
in The New York Times in 1911) to the old woman driven mad by her deprived circumstances (EC 4)Williams also forms transatlantic kinships with European figures and art works, linking them to local contacts. Thus, his textual tour
through Germany and the Netherlands in the European section (5-9) begins
with his 1906 Birthday Acrostic to his friend and one-time romantic interest
H.D. (6), and ends in a nostalgic reminiscence of his fiance, Florence Herman.
Flossies Norwegian heritage also provides Williams with a personal context
for a reference of almost Poundian obscurantism as Tatters delves into Norse
mythology. Specifically, he quotes a passage from Grmnisml, the fourth section
of the Codex Regius, in which the world is created From Ymirs flesh (EC 8).7 This
volume of medieval Scandinavian writing contained poems interspersed with
prose passages, which may have provided a model for Tatters. Tellingly, Williams referred to the same lines from Grmnisml in the Improvisations, but in
addition to its splicing of voices and genres, like Tatters, Kora in Hell also counterpoints the mythical and domestic spheres in which the poets imagination travels.8 In fact, Tatters sets down an early version of this dialectic, as its poems
frequently use motifs of home, marriage and maternity as the final point of return
from the poets journeys. In last poem of the typescripta version of which was
later published as And Thus With All Praise (CP1 22)Williams comes home to
his Bride and Mother (EC 9; Williams married Flossie in December 1912). Tatters gives the first glimpse of the structural inversions that enabled Williams to
anchor his project in America but simultaneously connect it to a global literary
culture. These transnational emphases can emerge effortlessly, at times almost imperceptibly, alongside the quotidian details that obsessed him.
Williams channelled his poetic experiments from 1909-1912 into his first
commercially-published collection of poetry, The Tempers. The book was produced in London by Elkin Matthews in 1913 and dedicated to Ezra Pound. Like
Tatters, the collection is transitional, with some poems containing the archaic
diction associated with his 1909 Poems, while others incorporated the strident,
imagistic aesthetic for which he became best known. Responding in part to F.S.

xv

 xvi

William Carlos Williams Review

Flints and Pounds 1913 treatises on imagism, Williams attempted to schematize

the prosodic shifts that he felt underpinned the modern forms he had embraced.
He concluded that the defining property of the new poetry was its rhythm, and on
20 August 1913 sent his first essay describing the nature of this metrical shift to
Poetry in a manuscript entitled English Speech Rhythms (Parisi and Young 116).
As Mike Weaver explains, [Poetry editor] Harriet Monroe returned it as incomprehensible. It may have been so in its earliest form, but the typescript, entitled
simply Speech Rhythm . . . is in some respects his clearest statement on measure (82). Williams probably reworked the earlier manuscript, but he never published the resulting typescript.9 He may have felt that his technical preoccupations
in Speech Rhythm had become redundant, given how widespread the musical
preoccupations of Imagism had become; but Monroe might also have gazumped
him with her own reference[s] to the laws of rhythm in terms of wave theory
(Weaver 82, 84), which she discussed in her November 1913 article Rhythms of
English Verse (Monroe 61-62). In fact, Williams shared many of Monroes (fairly
conservative) conclusions, but he insisted that the modern poetic foot should be
enlarged into a unit more flexible and more accurate than old meter forms
(EC 11), whereas Monroes model adhered more rigidly to standard musical time
signatures. Yet despite his emphasis on flexibility and contingency, Williams still
insisted on accuracy (10). On those terms, he rejected vers libre as prose by
another name (10)a rejection that he would repeat, reject, and reinstate again
later on in his career.10 In his earliest manuscripts, however, the rhetorical strategies that he developed were often more important than the minutiae of his attempts to Americanize scansion.
In the VortexWilliam Carlos Williams manuscripts, presented here in their
complete form for the first time, the most important task that Williams undertook
was to triangulate his locational poetics by refining his quotation strategies. Initially, the manuscripts were his aesthetic response to the death of the vorticist
sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Pound compared Williams to Gaudier-Brzeska
in a December 1913 letter (Pound and Williams 22), and Williams followed the
sculptors career until it ended in the trenches of World War I. In the uneven,
heavily-revised Vortex manuscripts, Williams pays tribute to a fellow artist and
the movement he represented, accept[ing] the juxtaposition of other vortexes
[sic] to my own thereby affirming my own (EC 16). The tracts are indebted to
Pounds vorticist and imagist essays, but more so to the posthumously-published
Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska, which appeared in Blast 2 (July 1915) and argued that
vorticist principles remained constant even when tested by the extreme circumstances of trench warfare.11 However, as Williams works his way through each
section of the manuscript, his own terminologies emerge forcefully amid a tangle

WHITE

Introduction

of deletions, additions, false starts and reformulations. In some respects, his belabored engagements with imagist and vorticist aesthetics are the main value of
reading the manuscript in facsimile. In particular, his deletions and the places in
which they occur are often as informative as his eventual conclusions. For example, when Williams becomes bogged down in his negotiation of the planes,
lines, and geometric terms on the first page of UB, C147A (EC 13), he eventually discards the heavily abstracted language of the final paragraph and begins
again by focusing on the environment in which I have happened to bea strategy that he would continue to refine in later works (14). Moreover, the original
manuscripts contain key phrases (such as his reference to the juxtaposition of
other vortexes) that Williams did not delete, but which Bram Djikstra omitted in
his scrupulous but interventionist presentation of the manuscripts in A Recognizable Image (57-59).
Although Djikstras editorial decisions in Vortex are admirably transparent,
the final document tends to emphasise Williamss declarations of artistic independence at the expense of statements that place his work in relation to that of
others (EC 19). Yet at this stage of his career, such comparisons allowed Williams
to chart his own position within the international networks that he published in.
For this reason, he began to think of other artists phrases as intellectual resources, a collection of dynamic forces that he could engage with and manipulate to facilitate his own expression, rather than static positions either to oppose
or mimic (19). So in VortexWilliam Carlos Williams, identifying the nature of
those relationships was crucial. Beginning with juxtaposition and superposition (16), he later experiments with apposition in the handwritten passages of
manuscript (17-18) before settling on juxtaposition and borrowing in UB,
C147B (19). These relational terms allow him to test the quality of the contacts
that he uses to determine his own position when undertaking the composition of
phrasesa place that he consistently pairs with his geographical location (19).
The process of writing the Vortex manuscripts prompted Williams to deny
that I am dependant on any place, and to insist upon the relevance of his own
views to transatlantic debates concerning art and literature conducted in little
magazines (EC 14). Tellingly, he reprised this assertion in the Prologue to Kora in
Hell, declaring that I wish that I might here set down my Vortex after the fashion
of London, 1913, stating how little it means to me whether I live here, there or
elsewhere (I 16). It is also worth noting the extent to which Prologue relies on
quotations to make its arguments, from the excerpts of letters by Wallace Stevens,
Pound and H.D., to the unattributed lines from Orrick Johnss 1915 poem Blue
Undershirts, which Williams identified as an autochthonic New World riposte to
T.S. Eliots European-derived arcana (I 24). Even though he chose to abandon

xvii

 xviii

William Carlos Williams Review

VortexWilliam Carlos Williams, the manuscripts serve as a major point of

departure for his early poetics, and strategies that he rehearsed in them resurface
in later works. Accordingly, this presentation of Vortex concludes with UB,
C147B, a section that Dijkstra has called its alternate first page (RI 257), but
which Williams probably drafted last. In this way, the manuscripts remain an
open-ended experiment rather than the manifesto-like version presented in RI,
which concludes with Williamss uncharacteristic renunciation of all technique
(EC 15, RI 59). In fact, just one year later Williams would identify technique as
the salvation of American poetry in his first published piece of literary prose.
July 1915 marked a period of endings and beginnings for Williams, and the
prose that he wrote in its aftermath begins the Uncollected Prose 1916-23 section of this edition. Blast had just announced Gaudier-Brzeskas death, while in
the same month of that year, Alfred Kreymborg launched his influential New Jersey-based little magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse to a fanfare of
national publicity. Kreymborgs venture would shape Williamss career profoundly, and his role as Others Associate Editor cemented his associations with
Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and a host of major and minor poets for decades to come. Yet ironically, Williamss first published literary article
apparently denounced the very magazine that he initially regarded as the sun of
a new dawnin its little yellow paper cover (EC 20). A compound irony was that
The Great Opportunity, addressed to an American avant-garde, appeared in an
English magazine, The Egoist, in September 1916.12 The gesture was, I think, carefully calculated. Williams temporarily took the reins as the editor of Others for the
July 1916 Competitive Number, which he hoped would revive a group of poets
whose minds [had begun] to go to sleep after reaching their high-water mark
prematurely (20). However, The Great Opportunity framed their collective failure as a potential American triumph. By using The Egoists international profile
to embarrass American poets into reviving their lost impetus as a matter of national pride, Williams could declare the self-important movement . . . dead, and
its poets creative advance underway. For Williams, that advance involved
renewing Others focus on prosodic technique and the skilful use of small words
instead of generating group publicity (20). Typically, and in keeping with the postvorticist context of The Egoist, The Great Opportunity oscillates violently between blasting and blessing Othersbetween creative destruction and poetic
rebirth.
Between 1916 and 1918, Williams became increasingly fascinated by the polarities of human experience that seemed exaggerated (and problematized) by
modernity: life and death, ancient and modern, sterility and fertility, and so on.
Frequently, Williams represented these dynamics in shorthand using gender. In

WHITE

Introduction

the summer of 1917, his two-part debate with The Egoists contributing editor
Dora Marsden catalyzed this strategy while creating another important juncture in
his evolution as a prose writer. Their correspondence, entitled The Great Sex
Spiral, focused on Marsdens serialized essay Lingual Psychology: A New Conception of the Function of Philosophic Inquiry. Williams agreed with Marsdens
Weinigerian principles of gendered psychology, but as Brian Bremen notes, Williams disagreed with her reduction of experience to a philosophical algebra, a
position which, along with her notion of fixing language, would have been
anathema to him (52). In the second part of The Great Sex Spiral, Williams argued that although philosophy . . . invents terms, or rather transposes them from
the different sense-languages into a kind of Esperanto, he felt that the discipline
had become dissociated from the sensory world of objects and localities (EC 22).
Indeed, Bremen rightly points out that Williams struggled with the strictures of
philosophical argument throughout his career (52-53). Given his attraction to
structural and thematic antitheses, however, Williamss difficulties with the discipline were probably the very reason that it consistently intrigued him. Indeed, the
Five Philosophical Essays (1910-1915) appended to The Embodiment of Knowledge formed the intellectual bedrock for his nascent pragmatism, and gave him
the chance to explore the provisionality of knowledge, the contingency of experience and the limitations of philosophical inquiry (EK 153-91). In Constancy and
Freedom, for example, he insisted that We are building; all [knowledge] is in
degree (EK 155). For Williams, embodying knowledge in prose usually involved
a blend of extemporized performance and self-reflexive analysisof polemic and
deliberationand his philosophical writing formed a rich part of that project.
In the fall of 1917, just before the publication of Al Que Quiere!, Williams
began his long and fruitful association with The Little Review, which helped him
hone and diversify his prose. Edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the
journals contributors spanned continents, and its serialization and advocacy of
works like James Joyces Ulysses and its (somewhat disingenuous) disregard for
public taste came to epitomise the ethos of modernist little magazines. Williamss serialization of Kora in Hell in The Little Review did not achieve the same
notoriety as Joyces contributions, but it captured the attention of fellow modernists and helped establish him as a serious modernist prose writer. Indeed, apart
from Love Song (1918) and two further collections of poems that he published
in 1920 and 1926, most of Williamss twenty contributions to The Little Review
were prose. His first publication in its pages was the opening Improvisation for
Kora in Hell beginning Fools have big wombs, which appeared in October 1917
(I 31). Williams published excerpts from Improvisations until the summer of 1919,
but although less frequently cited, his other appearances in The Little Review

xix

 xx

William Carlos Williams Review

were also important in forging his reputation as a writer whose used detailed explorations of his local environment formed synergies between his topics and his
techniques, and built bridges between American and European avant-garde art
scenes. For example, his essay-like study Prose About Love and the more improvisational tract The Ideal Quarrel both addressed the volatile terrain of married
life. But these pieces also delivered covert meditations on Williamss evolving
poetics, which set up opposing subjects in order to explore and problematize the
dialectical relationships that he felt defined modernity. Throughout The Ideal
Quarrel, for instance, he set down early qualifications of his lifelong emphasis
on new beginnings by claiming that entirely new beginnings are usually impossible, because Every part of a changed alignment is a counterpart of the dead
old (EC 30). Applying this principle to the essays genre, in Prose About Love
he claimed that Of loves humility and its gentleness no prose can speak in fit
termsno didactic prose at any rate (29). For Williams, love in the modern age
represented a weapon of appalling difficulty to the human hand, and prose
needed to reflect that difficulty (24). Thus, even in that most conventional genre,
the short story, Williams insisted on testing its limits. For example, his sequence
Three Professional Studies used autobiographical short fiction as a platform for
discussing not only his medical practice, but also his poetics and Dora Marsdens practical philosophy (46). As ever, his professional life dovetailed with his
creative one, each sphere revolving around his talent for diagnosis (48).
In December 1918, the resuscitation of Others provided new opportunities for
Williams to hone his diagnostic skills in prose. After a fallow period of erratic
publication, Others resumed regular service thanks to new partnerships between
contributors based in the Midwest and those on the East Coast. The Others Lecture Bureau in Chicago was instrumental in this revival, and was hosted by Anna
Morgan and organized by the poets Lola Ridge and Mitchell Dawson.13 During
this exciting period, Williams distilled his new treatises on poetics into a lecture
for the Bureau that he presented on 15 April 1919. In a 14 March 1919 letter to
Dawson, Williams announced that his title would be A PROVISIONAL SCHEME
OF THE UNIVERSE, but its eventual published form was more functional: Notes
from a Talk on Poetry. The title calls attention to the works oral performance, as
well as its provisionalitythese were notes from a longer discourse, and thus
were transitional or suggestive rather than definitive statements. In fact, as Williams indicated in a letter of 28 April 1919, Harriet Monroe was primarily responsible for the final presentation of the essay. For once he was grateful for her
editorial interventions, and congratulated her for getting out the substance of
what I had to say and arranging the thing as a unit (Parisi and Young 132). Nevertheless, like the Prologue to Kora in Hell and Spring and All, Notes was a seri-

WHITE

Introduction

ous meditation on modern poetry . . . that body of verse written under conditions
of my living knowledge, and with which I am in sympathy (EC 58).
In keeping with his major works of the 1920s, Notes explicitly connected
Williamss prosody to the literary debates surrounding their creation, but also
drew upon the scientific and clinical discourses he encountered in his medical
practice.14 He believed that such investigations were allied to the same vocational
search for truth that artists engaged in, a point that he underscores by comparing the astronomer Professor Doolittle, the father of H.D. to the medieval French
poet Francois Villon (EC 56-57). Yet for all of his claims to poetic individuality and
empiricism, for stand[ing] alone and breaking with the past, he ends Notes by
cracking jokes with Fra Angelico, the Italian Renaissance painter, and watching
him begin the new picture (59). Typically, Williams reaches out to his collaborators and back into history while simultaneously surging forward alone towards the
new, the modern and the unknown.
After his reconnection with Others and Poetry personnel during his April 1919
Chicago readings, Williams returned to the East Coast buzzing with competitive
energy. He announced to Monroe at the end of April that I am planning to take
over Others for a couple of months this summer (Parisi and Young 132). His insane week in Chicago had been a powerful stimulus, but his homecoming convinced him that We are at the opening of a golden age of poetry HERE on the
East Coast (132). This was trueexcept that for Williams, new beginnings usually
resulted from (or continued) spectacular finales. As Suzanne Churchill has pointed
out, the two editorials that book ended his July 1919 issue of Others, Gloria!
and Belly Music, were no exception to this rule and apparently brought the
magazine to a fractious end (102). Yet read closely, Gloria! and Belly Music,
like The Great Opportunity, also contain Williamss blueprints for a literary rebirth, and not just lamentations for the decline of a literary movement. In Gloria!, Williams explains that although he was beset by personal tragedies, the
Italian immigrant Emanuel Carnevali provided one source of (heavily qualified)
hope for a revival of American poetry. As Erin Templeton argues in this Special
Issue, Williams likely saw Carnevali as a kindred spirit: a fellow firebrand who
embraced the American language and was eager to help build an American literary community that would not be dependent on the European cultural establishment (EC 138). Templetons comprehensive account of Carnevali reclaims this
intriguing but troubled figure from the margins of literary history, revealing how,
for a brief moment, he operated in the epicenters of American modernist poetry.
At his best, and even at his self-destructive worst, Carnevali represented to
Williams the wide, Wide, WIDE open horizons of a New World poetics, where
perfection was sacrificed for innovation (EC 60). As Others collapsed, Williams

xxi

 xxii

William Carlos Williams Review

hoped Carnevali would serve as the focal point for New Yorks poetic revival. But
whereas Gloria! identified an individual poet as the savior of American poetry,
Belly Music wondered why there was no equivalent critic. In this editorial Supplement, Williams asks, Where is an analyst to state the perfections that can be
achieved in free verse and in no other way, the ONE american [sic] critic [who]
has BEGUN to think (67), and who does not have a deadly fear for the future
(68)?15 Williams did not claim to be that critic, but in these complex editorials, he
attempted to fill the gap, to emphasize a need which I dont know better how to
make apparent (63). By announcing that Others has come to an end, he began
to identify new directions for his avant-garde and for modernist poetics (60).
As Randy Ploogs research has revealed, however, the new beginning that Williams sought might have looked quite familiar. Although Others appeared to have
been blasted out of existence (EC 59), Kreymborg cryptically referred to a postmortem issue of Others that followed Williamss July 1919 obituary for the
journal in his 1925 autobiography Troubadour (330). No such issue is thought to
exist, but during his research on the Manierre and Mitchell Dawson papers at the
Newberry Library, Ploog discovered that Dawson proposed to found his own
little literary magazine in the spirit (and possibly the name) of Others in collaboration with Williams (EC 121).16 This venture never materialized, but several previously-unknown typescripts that Williams wrote in support of the New Others
have survived and are particularly important to modernist scholarship. Thanks to
Ploog, the essays Advancement of Learning and A New Weapon are presented in the Manuscripts c. 1919-21 section of this edition for the first time,
along with the poems A Goodmorning and The Luciad, which Williams also
sent to Dawson. A New Weapon reiterates Williamss demand in Belly Music
for a critic . . . with a warring pen who will take my weapon and smash the stupidities which I cannot even scratch (EC 106). Of course, A New Weapon also
replicates the backward glance that usually accompanied his focus on new beginnings during this period: this new OTHERS would [strike] back a light into the
old itself lighting up what has gone before (103). Advancement of Learning
also creates telling connections between Williamss early prose works. As Ploog
notes, it represents Williamss re-engagement with philosophical essay writing,
acting as a chronological bridge between the composition of Five Philosophical
Essays and The Embodiment of Knowledge (EC 125). Advancement also asserts
Williamss intellectual kinship with pragmatist philosophy, which the American
intellectual John Dewey (among others) was in the process of formulating at the
time. In fact, the essay confirms that in this regard, Williams was on a parallel
rather than derivative trajectory to Dewey, supporting John Becks argument that
Williamss own commitment to the notion of an experientially based, socially

WHITE

Introduction

transformative art was already well thought out by the time EK was written in the
late 1920s (Beck 57).
Ultimately, Others failed to re-launch in 1919, as Dawson and his potential
collaborators chose to pursue other projects. However, this intensely productive
but hidden episode in the history of Americas free verse revolution was a period
when failed experiments bore unexpected fruit. In the final issue of Others, Williams had brought together established poets and new discoveries, including Carnevali and Dawson. His quest to connect American avant-gardes more securely to
their own environs also unearthed two other talents: the poet of Maine, Wallace
Gould, and Alva N. Turner, a former preacher from Ina, Illinois. In A Maker, Williams championed Gould as a local artist of immaculate craft (EC 71). Gould
proved that a man can be a poet under any circumstances, and recalling the
Vortex manuscripts, Williams praised the fact that this [realization] has not removed him from his world (71). Williamss and the painter Marsden Harleys
joint support of Gould also sparked a debate about American art with the editors of The Little Review, which drew further articles from Williams, including
Four Foreigners and More Swill. However, his response to Turner provoked an
equally prolific but more volatileand, in terms of Williamss poetics, more importantseries of letters and prose works concerning artists and their localities.
As Christopher MacGowan argues in this Special Issue, Turners self-deprecating, garrulous, informal and detailed style clearly fascinated Williams and reinforced his idea of Turner as a kind of pure product of America both part of and at
odds with his environment (160). Scholars usually encounter Turner via the small
but revealing selection of Williamss early correspondence with him in Selected
Letters, and through Turners fleeting appearances in The Great American Novel
and Paterson. In this Anniversary Number, however, MacGowan has mined a
wealth of archival material to unearth their many rich and absorbing discussions
of poetry, and the sometimes tragic quotidian dramas that shaped those exchanges. Like Carnevali, Turner represented a fragile beacon of hope to Williams,
an elusive promise held out by the New World avant-gardes evolving around him.
These exquisite but flawed talents had been produced by historically unique conditions, and were capable of creating important if uneven work. For this reason,
Williams announced to Turner in a 21 November 1919 letter that he wanted to
profile him for The Little Review (Y, B78, F1596). Nearly five months later, on 14
April 1920, Williams warned Turner that your skin will creep when you see what
I have done (Y, B78, F1596). During a research trip to the Beinecke Library, I located the results of Williamss efforts in his then-uncatalogued correspondence
with Turner. The Degradation of Life in America, The Letters + Poems of Alva
N. Turner, and Alva N. Turnerpreface to poems all provide striking insights

xxiii

 xxiv

William Carlos Williams Review

not only into a figure of enduring fascination to Williams, but also into the evolution of Williamss own poetics.
Williams probably composed The Degradation of Life in America and The
Letters + Poems of Alva N. Turner in the summer of 1919 (but possibly as late as
the spring of 1920). Materially, thematically and stylistically, these pieces constitute a fitting postscript to Others, and also develop ideas from the New Others
essays he sent to Dawson. Nominally, The Letters + Poems of Alva N. Turner
performs a functional introduction to Turners work, but as Williams admitted, I
do not chose [sic] to speak of this man as a poet. That will take care of itself. I am
interested in the phenomena. It is the perennial sign in the sky (EC 115). Turners
observations (examples of which are appended to MacGowans essay [EC 17478]) represented the conjoined forces of cultural decay and striking freedom
that Williams associated with new intellectual growth in the New World during
this period (115). As Williams explained in The Degradation of Life in America,
by virtue of Turners seclusion and focus, his work became an antidote to the unending displacement and replacement of words that American writers continually grappled with (113). To Williams, Turner successfully challenged Americas
subservient attitudes to European literatures with the unsmirched [sic] flavor of
his uncompromising degeneracy (112), embodying an American language that
was decaying under our own noses due to neglect (114). Ultimately, the Ina
poets unhealthy solitude was an imperfect mode of cultural resistance, because
the purity of his isolation and the purity of his values became excessively, almost incestuously, pure (113). Nevertheless, Turner filled Williams with ecstasy
because he typifie[d] the dilemma of Americas emergent literatures so powerfully (114), and especially their enforced detachment from the geographical and
cultural spaces of the United States.
Alva N. Turnerpreface to poems makes a clear distinction between literary
regionalisms fetishizations of local color and the localist modernist methods Williams was beginning to develop (see White 96-99). Using the example of Paul
Gauguin, the French fauvist painter who relocated to Tahiti, Williams argues that
regardless of their location or nationality, artists could become local by transplantation through aesthetic praxes of contact (EC 116). The empirical register of
the essay repeatedly draws attention to evidence of [the] intimate relationship
between the writers[] sensations and the environment, which he expresses
through a radical emphasis on experimental form and site-specific subjects (116).
Literary phenomena such as Turner suggested to Williams new ways in which
American writers might bring their own worlds into sharper focus.
Galvanized by their mutual interest in Deweys articles for The Dial and New
Republic, and frustrated that Dawson had been unable to launch a New Others,

WHITE

Introduction

Williams and the Midwestern poet-editor Robert McAlmon joined forces to found
the little magazine Contact. The editors agreed with Deweys conviction that
Americas disparate urban and rural localities were untapped reservoirs of
uniquely New World experiences (see Dewey 684-88). Adapting Deweyan localism to the avant-garde aesthetics of Contact, Williams and McAlmon differentiated their methods from nostalgic regionalist writing and hollow literary
nationalisms. In a Contact 1 editorial, for example, Williams called on writers to
explore in detail the essential contact between words and the locality that breeds
them, in this case America, rather their cultural antecedents (RI 65). In this way,
Contacts editors provided a specialized forum in which avant-garde writers might
meet the best in Europe with inventions of their own, and therefore develop
among our serious writers a sense of mutual contact first of all (SE 29).
Throughout his early career, intellectual exchanges between European and
American artists obsessed Williams, and he was determined to use Contact as a
relay point between transatlantic avant-gardes. The material gathered in this edition reveals his protracted and complicated engagement with the terms upon
which those encounters were negotiated. Although difficult and sometimes contradictory, on the whole these works reveal the subtlety and agility with which
Williams approached his creative transactions with Europe. In Contact, he illustrated the personal stakes of these encounters in intimate and potentially embarrassing ways. One of his most famous uncollected short stories is The Three
Letters, which appeared in Contact 4 in September 1921. This narrative details
his relationship with Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a fallen European
aristocrat who initially disdained America, her adopted home. However, through
her contact with its emerging dada scene and The Little Review, the Baroness became the very embodiment of dada in New York (Gamel 9). To Williams, her
poverty and willful marginality suggested a paradoxical union of Old World social hegemonies and New World freedoms. She was the fulfilment of a wish, he
wrote; Even the queen she held herself to be in her religious fervors of soul, so in
actuality she was to him: America personified in the filth of its own imagination
(EC 79). As such, despite her best efforts, the Baroness served as another example
of an artist becoming local by transplantation. And as with so many encounters
between the Old World and the New in Williamss early work, the interpersonal
dynamics of The Three Letters oscillate between extreme versions of intellectual
and physical contact. The story explores states of sexual tension and release,
misunderstanding and communion, and aggression and euphoria, only to resolve
ambivalently (he eventually ends the encounter with a misogynistic tirade). Nevertheless, these awkward failures of contact between America and Europe in his
work became as important to Williamss aesthetics of contact as his more success-

xxv

 xxvi

William Carlos Williams Review

ful transatlantic exchanges, such as A Matisse, which reconstructed Henri

Matisses painting The Blue Nude in prose for US readers (SE 30-31).
Williamss examinations of adaptation and creative reconstruction took on an
added urgency during the late-1910s and early 1920s. Reprising his arguments in
the Vortex manuscripts, Williams explained in his 1919 review essay Four Foreigners that I do not try to illustrate my remarks with passages from mens work.
The work they do is my speech (72). In this configuration, he fused his own and
others work into a transnational language of the arts, a colored sunset of words
twisted into nameless patterns (72). As he insisted in his Contact 3 essay Yours,
O Youth, influence was the international currency of the arts, but such processes must always be grounded in local, lived experience: he reasoned, why
escape influences unless one has imitated the wrong thing? (SE 36). Williams
pushed this position to extremes in The Great American Novel when he plagiarized an article from a mass-market periodical, Ladies Home Journal, as part of his
interrogation of intertextuality and originality in American literature.17 (Indeed
like The Three Letters, his article for The Freeman A Man Versus the Law asserted that criminality could become a form of artistic expression: Williams
praised the philosopher-thief John Coffey for deliberately courting arrest in order
to prosecute a case against the law itself [EC 76]). In his early prose, however,
Williams adopted such extreme tactics to comment on the intellectual burden
created by Americas cultural inheritance from Europe. The volatility of his claims
matched the intensity of his conviction that his writing (and that of his peers) was
as relevant to his modernist counterparts overseas as theirs was to him. Williamss
cultural localism facilitated this position rather than hindered it, because the
unique and untranslatable site-specificities of artists localities could become appraisable through their creative expressions, making the locality, as Dewey had
phrased it, the only universal point of reference for artists (687).
Yet for Williams, even this sort of imaginative contact had its limits. As Mark
Goble has argued, despite his easy language of pure exchange, [Williams]
knew that modernism was made of moments where communication partly fails,
and thus means even more (302). In this sense, Williamss works of translation
and transliteration form crucial sites in which circuits of contact were both forged
and disrupted. In this Anniversary Number, Gabriele Hayden explores how Williamss early translations and collage experiments for In the American Grain
establish an American idiom based in the multiple languages and literary resources of the Americas (EC 182). Hayden traces the complex ways in which
The Discovery of the Indies (an early experimental version of the essay on Columbus originally published in Broom and later collected in AG) emerges from
themes explored in his translation projects of the 1910s. She argues that The

WHITE

Introduction

Discovery of the Indies and Williamss translation of Rafael Arvalo Martnezs

The Man who Resembled a Horse represent versions of a Latin American discourse of the mestizo subject that seek to exceed the limitations of colonial romance, even as they ultimately fail to do so (183).18 But in Haydens argument,
such failed attempts at contact are inherently in the American grain, and rich
sources for Williamss modernist poetics besides: both texts reflect on the role of
sexuality in crafting a New World identity. And both texts are works of translation
and re-framing (195). In each work, Williams gazes into the Americas past, and
his reflections on the new earth it promised both clarified and complicated his
vision for its future (193).
As Williams held up a mirror to this modernity in his early career, his preoccupation with indigenous American literatures often was less concerned with actual contact than with the various ways in which that contact was mediated and
problematized. As he declared in the second paragraph of Spring and All, There
is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here. Or rather, the whole world is
between: Yesterday, tomorrow, Europe, Asia, Africa, all things removed and impossible (I 177). And of course, when Williams says that such contact is impossible, he immediately begins crafting a text that reveals the multiple ways in
which that contact could be (re-)imagined. Williamss preoccupation with diagnosis and perception often produce moments of stunning clarity in which the
complex mlange of written and spoken language that evolved in the Americas
becomes effortlessly intelligible. But equally, the optical metaphors that he uses to
describe those processes can also reveal his fascination with the obscurity and
indecipherability of New World experience and histories, even in his adaptations
of works by others. For example, in The Man who Resembled a Horse, a convex mirror and transparent convex glass create distorted perspectives and
objects (EC 39), while in the appropriated text of The Discovery of the Indies,
a (misidentified) discovery is postponed because of a false sighting of landwhen
what had been said to be land was only clouds (88). For Williams, such moments reveal fundamental truths about modernity and the New World, where
revelations disorient the observer and paradoxically further obscure what is observed. The early prose works of Williams brought together in this edition can
function in a similar way. These disparate, sometimes tangential, or even fragmentary pieces frequently produce unexpected epiphanies, sometimes viewed
askance from obscure vantage points, before they are subsumed by their intricate enlargement[s] (12). In this way, his Uncollected Prose and Unpublished
Manuscripts reveal how Williamss project, and indeed, how literary modernism
itself, was constructed from jagged edges, unfinished connections and stray tan-

xxvii

 xxviii

William Carlos Williams Review

gents as well as clean lines and smooth surfaces. By presenting items omitted
from Williamss standard early prose texts alongside previously-unknown manuscripts from the same period, it is hoped that this critical resource will stimulate
further discussion about the marginal areas of Williamss early oeuvre, and the
extraordinary breadth of his literary contacts.

Notes
1 These citations are from Prologue to Kora in Hell: Improvisations, Notes from a Talk
on Poetry and Belly Music respectively; references to this Thirtieth Anniversary Number
of the William Carlos Williams Review are abbreviated in text as EC. For archival citation
conventions, please see Notes on Sources (White, Davis and Ploog, EC 117-19).
2 Wallaces facsimile edition of The Little Red Notebook that Williams kept on his medical rounds in 1914 revealed how his professional and creative lives frequently intersected,
while the Reviews reprinting of his 1917 essay America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry
restored an important statement of his early poetics to scholarly attention. See White, Davis
and Ploog for bibliographic details on reprintings and reproductions of Williamss early
prose in The William Carlos Williams Review and elsewhere (EC 118-19).
3 Major collections of Williamss prose include AG, EK, FD, I, RI, SE, SL, and SS. The
earliest piece in the present facsimile edition is the 1906 Birthday Acrostic in Tatters (EC
6) and the latest piece is The Discovery of the Indies, an essay that Williams wrote for AG
in 1922 before he began writing Spring and All and published in Broom in 1923 (EC 84-92).
John Beck has succinctly described Spring and All as Williamss crash course in modernist
poetics (61). This edition endorses the books iconic status as the best statement of Williamss early poetics, but situates Spring and All as a project inseparable from the early work
collected here and elsewhere, including his equally important (but perhaps more difficult)
books Kora in Hell (1920) and The Great American Novel (1923).
4 On Williams as a culturally-located transnational modernist, see Bennett (271-73),
Nicholls (206-14), and Ramazani (43). On Williams and American poetry canons, see Golding (128-36, 143, 159).
5 These upheavals are well known: Florences sister Charlotte Herman reject Williamss marriage proposal in favor of an engagement with his brother Edgar in 1909, and
earlier that year, Williams resigned from his promising career in a New York hospital on a
matter of principle. Pound had also dismissed his Poems (1909) as dated and unoriginal,
adding a sense of creative failure to these personal and professional crises (Mariani 74-80).
6 See Notes on Sources (EC 117).
7 As Bruce Lincoln explains, [the Norse deity] Odin and his brothers killed [the primeval deity] Ymir, carved up his body, and produced the universe from it: earth from his flesh,
the sea from his blood, stones from his teeth, and so on (382).
8 In Kora in Hell, Williams writes, of Ymirs flesh the earth was made and of his thoughts
were all the gloomy clouds created. Oya! (I 55)

WHITE

Introduction

9 Weaver quoted the majority of Speech Rhythm in his 1971 study William Carlos Williams: The American Background (82-83); see Notes on Sources (EC 118).
10 In his 1917 article America, Whitman and the Art of Poetry, Williams argued that
American poetry must be free verse in a sense, but that it must be governed (29). In
1919, he contradicted this position in Belly Music, claiming that free verse is the ONLY
form that CAN CARRY THE NEW MEANING (EC 61). He returned to his 1913 stance in
Autobiography (A 264).
11 Weaver notes that in Vortex Williams focuses on the following passage from Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska: I SHALL DERIVE MY EMOTIONS SOLELY FROM THE ARRANGEMENT OF SURFACES, I shall present my emotions by the ARRANGEMENT OF MY
SURFACES, THE PLANES AND LINES BY WHICH THEY ARE DEFINED (qtd. in Weaver 36).
12 The Great Opportunity has of course already appeared in Selected Letters, where it
was incorrectly dated 1915 and mistakenly identified as a letter to the editor (SL 30-33).
By re-presenting the article as an article, this edition seeks to re-establish it as a key point of
reference for formal and thematic strategies that Williams developed in his early prose.
13 See Ploog (EC 135, n4).
14 Indeed, Williams recycled a section of the Prologue to Kora in Hell in Notes from
a Talk on Poetry to clarify his methods: Heavy talk is talk that waits upon a deed. Talk is
servile that is set to inform. Words with the bloom on them run before the imagination like
the Saeter girls before Peer Gynt. It is talk with the patina of whim upon it that makes action
a bootlicker (EC 65-66; I 17).
15 Williams returned to this question in Contact in his quest for the American Critical
Attitude (SE 34).
16 As Ploog notes, Kreymborg and Carnevali, and later, Maxwell Bodenheim, Lola
Ridge, and Robert McAlmon, were also important figures in Dawsons New Others project (EC 122). For a discussion of McAlmons role in this venture, see White (94-96).
17 See Witemeyer 3-4.
18 Although The Man who Resembled a Horse was reprinted in New Directions 8 in
1944 (see Wallace 172), it still proved difficult to access, hence its inclusion here.

Works Cited
Beck, John. Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and
American Cultural Politics (Albany: State U of New York P, 2001). Print.
Bennett, David. Defining the American Difference: Cultural Nationalism and the Modernist Poetics of William Carlos Williams. Southern Review 20.3 (1987): 27180.
Print.
Bremen, Brian A. William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1993. Print.
Churchill, Suzanne. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American
Poetry. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006. Print.

xxix

 xxx

William Carlos Williams Review

Dear Editor: A History of Poetry in Letters. Eds. Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young. New York
and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002. Print.
Dewey, John. Americanism and Localism. The Dial 68.6 (1920): 684-88. Print.
Gamel, Irene. Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2002. Print.
Goble, Mark. Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life. New York: Columbia
UP, 2010. Print.
Golding, Alan. From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry. Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 1995. Print.
Holsapple, Bruce. Williams on Form: Kora in Hell. Sagetrieb 18.2-3 (2002): 79-126.Print.
House, Roy Temple. A Mad Poet. New York Times, 18 June 1911, sec. BR: 388. New York
Times. Web. 1 July 2013.
Alfred Kreymborg, Troubadour. New York: Liveright, 1924. Print
Lincoln, Bruce. Kings, Cowpies, and Creation: Intertextual Traffic Between History and
Myth in the Writings of Snorri Sturlason. Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions. Eds. Anders Andrn, Kristina Jennbert,
and Catharina Raudvere. Lund: Nordic Academic, 2006. 381-88. Print.
Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1981. Print.
Monroe, Harriet. Rhythms in English Verse. Poetry 3.2 (1913): 61-68. Print.
Moore, Marianne. Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1909-1924. Ed. Robin G.
Schulze. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Print.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: a Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995. Print.
Pound, Ezra and William Carlos Williams. Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound
and William Carlos Williams. Ed. Hugh Witemeyer. New York: New Directions,
1996. Print
Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Print.
Wallace, Emily Mitchell. A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams. Middleton, Connecticut: Weslyan UP, 1968. Print.
Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams: The American Background. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1971. Print.
Witemeyer, Hugh. Plagiarism in The Great American Novel: the Ethics of Collage. The
William Carlos Williams Review 23.1 (1997): 1-13. Print.
White, Eric. Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Print
Williams, William Carlos. Letter to Mitchell Dawson. 14 Mar 1919. TS. N. B7, F453. Print.
. Letter to Alva N. Turner. 14 Apr 1920. TS. Y. B78, F1596. Print.
. America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry. The Poetry Journal 8.1 (1917): 2736.
Print.
Willis, Patricia C. Rev. of Poems by William Carlos Williams and ed. by Virginia M. WrightPeterson. William Carlos Williams Review 24.2 (2004): 8990. Print.

Tatters  

William Carlos Williams: Early Manuscripts c. 1906-16. Tatters. 1905-16.Y. F1381. TS.

William Carlos Williams Review

Please see Notes on Sources (117-19) for transcriptions of handwritten matter

Tatters  

William Carlos Williams Review

Tatters  

William Carlos Williams Review

Tatters  

William Carlos Williams Review

Tatters  

 10

William Carlos Williams Review

Speech Rhythm. 1913. Y (Baxter Jordan). YCAL MSS 175, B3, F140. TS.

Speech

Rhythm   11

 12

William Carlos Williams Review

"Vortex William Carlos Williams." [1915]. UB. C147 A.

Vortex  

13

 14

William Carlos Williams Review

Please see Notes on Sources (117-19) for transcriptions of handwritten matter

Vortex  

15

 16

William Carlos Williams Review

Vortex William Carlos Williams. [1915]. UB. C147 A [Dijkstra C-174 (c)]. TS.

Vortex  

Vortex William Carlos Williams. [1915]. UB. C147 A [Dijkstra C-174 (d)]. MS.

17

 18

William Carlos Williams Review

Vortex William Carlos Williams. [1915]. UB. C147 B. TS.

Vortex  

19

 20

William Carlos Williams Review

Uncollected Prose 1916-23. C12. The Great Opportunity. Egoist 3.7 (1916): 137.

C18. The Great Sex Spiral [Part 1]. Egoist 4.3 (1917): 46.

The

Great Sex Spiral   21

 22

William Carlos Williams Review

C21. The Great Sex Spiral [Part 2]. Egoist 4.7 (1917): 110-11.

The

Great Sex Spiral   23

 24

William Carlos Williams Review

C27. Prose About Love. The Little Review 5.2 (1918): 5-10.

Prose

About Love   25

 26

William Carlos Williams Review

Prose

About Love   27

 28

William Carlos Williams Review

Prose

About Love   29

 30

William Carlos Williams Review

C30. The Ideal Quarrel. The Little Review 5.8 (1918): 39-40.

The

Ideal Quarrel   31

 32

William Carlos Williams Review

C31. The Man Who Resembled a Horse [trans.]. The Little Review 5.8 (1918): 42-53.

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   33

 34

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   35

 36

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   37

 38

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   39

 40

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   41

 42

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Man Who Resembled a Horse   43

 44

William Carlos Williams Review

The Reader Critic. The Little Review 5.9 (1919): 64.

Three

Professional Studies   45

C33. Three Professional Studies. The Little Review 5.10-11 (1919): 36-44.

 46

William Carlos Williams Review

Three

Professional Studies   47

 48

William Carlos Williams Review

Three

Professional Studies   49

 50

William Carlos Williams Review

Three

Professional Studies   51

 52

William Carlos Williams Review

Three

Professional Studies   53

 54

William Carlos Williams Review

C42. Notes from a Talk On Poetry. Poetry 14.4 (1919): 211-16.

Notes

from a Talk on Poetry   55

 56

William Carlos Williams Review

Notes

from a Talk on Poetry   57

 58

William Carlos Williams Review

Notes

from a Talk on Poetry   59

 60

William Carlos Williams Review

C40. Gloria. Others 5.6 (1919): 3-4.

Gloria!  

61

 62

William Carlos Williams Review

C41. Belly Music. Others 5.6 (July 1919): 25-32.

Belly

Music   63

 64

William Carlos Williams Review

Belly

Music   65

 66

William Carlos Williams Review

Belly

Music   67

 68

William Carlos Williams Review

Belly

Music   69

 70

William Carlos Williams Review

C43. A Maker. The Little Review 6.4 (1919): 37-8.

Maker   71

 72

William Carlos Williams Review

C44. Four Foreigners. The Little Review 6.5 (1919): 36-9.

Four

Foreigners   73

 74

William Carlos Williams Review

Four

Foreigners   75

 76

William Carlos Williams Review

C50. A Man Versus the Law. The Freeman 1.15 (1920): 348-49.

Man Versus the Law  

77

 78

William Carlos Williams Review

C65. Sample Prose Piece: The Three Letters. Contact 4 (1921): 10-13.

Sample

Prose Piece: The Three Letters   79

 80

William Carlos Williams Review

Sample

Prose Piece: The Three Letters   81

 82

William Carlos Williams Review

C74. Reader Critic. The Little Review 9.1 (1922): 59-60.

Reader

Critic   83

 84

William Carlos Williams Review

C79. The Discovery of the Indies. Broom 4.4 (1923):252-60.

The

Discovery of the Indies   85

 86

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Discovery of the Indies   87

 88

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Discovery of the Indies   89

 90

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Discovery of the Indies   91

 92

William Carlos Williams Review

Advancement

of Learning   93

Manuscripts c. 1919-21. Advancement of Learning. 1919? N. B23, F733. TS.

 94

William Carlos Williams Review

Please see Notes on Sources (117-19) for transcriptions of handwritten matter

Advancement

of Learning   95

 96

William Carlos Williams Review

Advancement

of Learning   97

 98

William Carlos Williams Review

Advancement

of Learning   99

 100

William Carlos Williams Review

Advancement

of Learning   101

 102

William Carlos Williams Review

A New Weapon. 1919. N. B23, F734. TS.

New Weapon   103

 104

William Carlos Williams Review

New Weapon   105

 106

William Carlos Williams Review

A Goodmorning. 1919. N. B23, F735. TS.

Good Morning   107

 108

William Carlos Williams Review

The Luciad. [1919?-21]. N. B23, F735. TS.

The

Luciad   109

 110

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Luciad   111

 112

William Carlos Williams Review

The Degradation of Life in America. 1919. Y. B23, F726. TS.

The

Degradation of Life in America   113

Please see Notes on Sources (117-19) for transcriptions of handwritten matter

 114

William Carlos Williams Review

The

Letters & Poems of Alva N. Turner   115

The Letters & Poems of Alva N. Turner. 1919-21? Y. B23, F. 726. TS.

 116

William Carlos Williams Review

Alva N. Turner Preface to Poems. 1920-21? Y. B23, F726. TS.

WHITE

Sources

117

Notes on Sources
ERIC WHITE AND EMMA DAVIS WITH RANDY PLOOG
The Facsimile Edition portion of The Early Career of William Carlos Williams gathers together previouslyuncollected and unpublished prose works that Williams wrote before the composition of Spring and All
(1923), up to and including The Discovery of the Indies (which was written in 1922 and published in
Broom in March 1923). In the following Notes, we provide detailed information about the archival
sources, bibliographical contexts, editorial praxes, and citation conventions used in the Thirtieth Anniversary Number of The William Carlos Williams Review (cited in text as EC throughout). We also provide a
bibliography of Williamss early prose not included in this edition along with relevant sources in Works
Cited. References to archives appearing in the captions and cited elsewhere in this Special Issue use the
abbreviations outlined below. In the cataloguing notation, B. indicates box, F. indicates folder
and format abbreviations follow usual bibliographical conventions. A question mark following the year
or year ranges indicates an uncertain but probable date. Where documents contain handwritten matter,
we provide line-by-line transcriptions in most cases. In our transcripts, we separate word clusters with
semicolons. Page references follow the last word or cluster, and we identify line breaks with a forward
slash, silently correcting spelling and identifying ambiguous words with a question mark.
ARCHIVES CONSULTED (ABBREVIATIONS)
N.
The Mitchell Dawson Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL (MSS Dawson); citations are followed by
relevant cataloguing data.
UB.
The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams housed at the Poetry Collection of the University
Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Citations are followed by relevant cataloguing data provided in Baldwin and Meyers (1978).
Y.
The Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University,
New Haven, CT, USA. Citations refer to the William Carlos Williams papers (YCAL MSS 116) unless otherwise indicated, and are followed by relevant cataloguing data.
EARLY MANUSCRIPTS CA. 1906-16.
Tatters (1906-16)
Y. F1381. TS. (EC 1-9). Virginia M. Wright-Peterson included seven of this manuscripts nine pages as
Notes from European Trip, 1909-1910 in Poems (Williams 2002 n.p.). As Patricia Willis has argued, the
first five pages (1-5) were probably written between 1910 and 1912, after Williams returned from European Trip (Willis 89). The final four pages were probably composed during his time abroad (July 1909June 1910), with a final attempt to edit the sequence in 1916. Williamss quotation of Die Irren [The
Madman] translated by Roy Temple House in 1911 (EC 3; House 388), and evidence identified by Willis
supports this timeframe (89). The second set of four pages (EC 6-9) are typed on European-style laid paper, suggesting that Williams composed them en route (Willis 89). Of this set, the final three pages (EC
7-9) retrace his travels through EuropeAntwerp, Germany, Spain, Gibraltar (Willis 89)with a few
detours, while the first page (identified as such by the numeral in its upper-right corner) contains the
Birthday Acrostic he wrote for H.D.s nineteenth birthday on 13 January 1906 (EC 6). The sonnet on EC
9, later published as And Thus With All Praise (CP1 22), is archived in UB, A254 with Martin and
Katherine (CP1 23), later published as The Wartburg (see Baldwin and Meyers 61). Williams visited
Martin Luthers study at the Warburg, Westphalia [sic] during his trip (EC 8). Transcriptions: Part I. Tatters. / (group them) (1); Jun. 13; Birthday Acrostic; Explain; Stet. / 1916 (6); [unproven(?)] / too
long / not even; them (7); funny; early; truly best; nor; nor of (8); Gibraltar (9).

117
William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 30 nos. 1-2, Spring-Fall 2013 Texas Tech University Press

 118

William Carlos Williams Review

Speech Rhythm (1913)

YCAL MSS 175, B3, F140. TS. (EC 10-12). Discovered by Mike Weaver, most of Speech Rhythm was
published in William Carlos Williams: The American Background (82-83). However, Weaver omitted the
following paragraphs beginning: In rythm [sic], in its . . . (10); The rythm [sic] must continue . . . (11);
It would be arbitrary . . . (11); A tree more meets . . . through But words in the . . . (11); The rythm
[sic] must be . . . (11); and Flexibility is only useful . . . through But if impossibility is difficult . . . (12).
Vortex William Carlos Williams (1915)
UB. C147 A and B (EC 13-19). Williams composed this manuscript in 1915 and probably made further
revisions in 1918 when he adapted sections of C147 A (14-15) for use in his Prologue to Kora in Hell (I
16; Mariani 787). Bram Dijkstras collated version, Vortex (RI 57-59), provides a further classification
system for the first section of the work catalogued at UB as C147 A. In this presentation he identifies an
alternate first page as C-147 (c) (16), and two pages of handwritten notesas C-147 (d) (RI 257). We
have supplemented our captions with these designations in hard brackets as Dijkstra C-174 (c) and
Dijkstra C-174 (d). Transcriptions: I recognise my / emotions as they / are / or / are not [?] / either [?]
(13); + so on + so / down thru[?] / the usual/ planes (15); for by them (16); + thus / I take surface to
mean for me / Substance is not considered for / apart from transparency, which shows nothing / + does
not exist aside / from surface or plane / by plane it exists in apposition to substance plane / is the appearance. (17); I affirm my existence / + perceive its quality / by apposition of planes. (18); By the
quality of the contacts / I affirm its quality; appearances; whatever; is; radius (19).
UNCOLLECTED PROSE 1916-23
The facsimiles of materials collected in this section were sourced from Y., U.B., and the editors own collection. Where applicable, we provide bibliographic references from Emily Mitchell Wallaces indispensible Bibliography of William Carlos Williams (1968). In some cases the physical restrictions imposed by
the print version of The William Carlos Williams Review presented us with challenges, as did some of our
sources. Due to their size and archival hard-binding, for example, items from The Egoist and The Freeman suffered from some distortion. We have taken care in all cases to provide a legible print copy, but
online versions of this issue can be used if problems arise. As of 1 July 2013, the following pieces from
The Egoist, The Little Review, Poetry, and Others are also freely available from The Modernist Journals
Project: The Great Opportunity (EC 20); The Great Sex Spiral [Parts 1 and 2] (21-3); Prose About
Love (24-8); The Ideal Quarrel (29-30); The Man Who Resembled a Horse (31-42); The Reader
Critic (43, 81-2); Three Professional Studies (44-52); Gloria! (53-4); Belly Music (55-62); Notes
from a Talk on Poetry (63-8); A Maker (69-70); and Four Foreigners (71-4). The Discovery of the
Indies (83-90) can be accessed via the online version of Broom hosted by the Blue Mountain Project.
The following prose works have been previously collected or reprinted elsewhere (see Wallace for additional reprintings of well-known works): The Normal and Adventitious Danger Periods for Pulmonary
Disease in Children (1913; private repr. New York: Dim Gray Bar Press [1988]), H1; Five Philosophical
Essays [1910-15] (EK 153-91); Vortex [1915] (RI 57-59); Improvisations (1917; I 31-32), C22; The
Delicacies [prose poem] (1917; CP1 155-56), C23; America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry (1917;
repr. William Carlos Williams Review 13.1 [1987]: 1-4), C24; Improvisations (1918; I 34-46), C25;
Prologue [to Kora in Hell: Improvisations]: The Return of the Sun (1919; SE 3-13, I 6-16), C35; Prologue (Continued) (1919; SE 13, 19-26, I 16, 22-30), C37; Improvisations (1919; I 46-51, 55-57), C38;
Notes [later in Prologue] (1919; I 16-18, 19), included in C37; More Swill (1919; RI 60-62), C45;
Danse Pseudomacabre (1920; FD 208-11), C48; Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920; I 6-82), A4; Further Announcement (1920; RI 65-66), C52 (the first Contact editorial is attributed to Williams [RI 64-65]
but was probably written by co-editor Robert McAlmon, as was C54); A Matisse (1921; SE 30-31), C55;
Comment [Contact editorial] (1921; SE 27-29), C56; What Every Artist Knows (1921; RI 62-63), C59;
Yours, O Youth (1921; SE 32-37), C61; The Accident (1921; FD 221-24), C62; Sample Critical Statement: Comment (1921; RI 66-68), C66; The Destruction of Tenochtitlan (1923; AG 27-39), C77; The
Discoverers: I. Red Eric (1923; AG 1-6). For Williamss 1910-1921 contributions to The Rutherford
American and Rutherford Republican, see David Frails Citizen Williams: Thirty New Items from the
Rutherford Newspapers (Parts 1-4); for Williamss 1914 journal, see The Little Red Notebook of William
Carlos Williams, eds. Emily Mitchell Wallace and William Eric Williams.
MANUSCRIPTS CA. 1919-21
Advancement of Learning (1919?), A New Weapon (1919), A Goodmorning (1919), The Luciad (1919?21)
Randy Ploog discovered all of the items sourced from the Mitchell Dawson Papers in the Newberry Library, which are reproduced in this Special Issue for the first time, and which he discusses in his article

WHITE

Sources

119

A New Others: The Correspondence between William Carlos Williams and Mitchell Dawson (EC 11833). Due to their fragile condition, some pages from the N. manuscripts incurred shading during archival
image capture. However, we have attempted to minimise or correct these artefacts wherever possible.
Transcriptions for Advancement of Learning [N. B23, F733. TS. (91-99)]: this (94); The Phases of
Knowledge; Obscenity has a / po[litical(?)] a[ccuracy(?)] here (95); But; the (96); to remain able
or to; anything; the one; data; scientists; lie (98); desire to be; desired (99). On Advancement of Learning, see Ploog 122-23; on A New Weapon [N. B23, F734. TS. (100-04)] see 126-27; on
A Goodmorning [N. B23, F735. TS. (105)] see 120, 127-28; and on The Luciad [N. B23, F735. TS.
(106-09)] see 130-31.
The Degradation of Life in America (1919), The Letters & Poems of Alva N. Turner (1919-21[?]), Alva N.
TurnerPreface to Poems (1920-21[?])
Eric White discovered these typescripts in Williamss previously-uncatalogued correspondence with
Turner at Y. Williams typed the three-page essay The Degradation of Life in America [Y, B23, F726. TS.
(EC 110-12)] on the verso of Others letterhead, probably between summer 1919 and spring 1920 (see EC
vii-ix). Williams used the verso of the same letterhead to draft a series of six poems that he sent to The
Little Review ca. 1920 (see Litzs and MacGowans notes on these poems in CP1 492). Williamss appreciations of Turner, which he mentions in a 14 April 1920 letter, could apply to The Letters and Poems of Alva N. Turner [Y, B23, F. 726. TS. (EC 113)], which he may have intended for either The Little
Review or Contact (EC viii). Williams composed Alva N. Turner Preface to Poems [Y, B23, F726. TS.
(114); also see ix] on the ubiquitous paper stock that begins to appear in his archives in 1920, a cheap
foolscap provided by his father-in-law from his printing business (Mariani 175). Transcriptions of The
Degradation of Life in America: none at home has equalled; + no outlander can; in my own marrow; is; through; him; by starvation; the foreign; this; He (EC 110); an; in his case;
Theirs; be; It is not (111).
WORKS CITED
Baldwin, Neil, and Steven L. Meyers. The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams in the Poetry Collection of the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo: A
Descriptive Catalogue. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Print.
Blue Mountain Project (searchable database). Princeton University, ongoing. Web. 1 July 2013.
Frail, David. Citizen Williams: Thirty New Items from the Rutherford Newspapers (Parts 1-4). William
Carlos Williams Review 13.2 (1987): 1-8; 14.2 (1988): 1-19; 14.2 (1988): 20-29; 15.1 (1989):
4-21. Print.
House, Roy Temple. A Mad Poet. New York Times, 18 June 1911, sec. BR: 388. Web. 1 July 2013.
Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Print.
The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing. Web. 1 July
2013.
Wallace, Emily Mitchell. A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams. Middleton, Connecticut: Weslyan
UP, 1968. Print.
Weaver, Mike. William Carlos Williams: The American Background. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971.
Print.
Williams, William Carlos. Poems. Ed. Virginia M. Wright-Peterson. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P,
2002. Print.

. The Little Red Notebook of William Carlos Williams. Eds. Emily Mitchell Wallace and William
Eric Williams. William Carlos Williams Review 9.1-2 (1983): 1-34. Print.

. America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry. The Poetry Journal 8.1 (1917): 2736. Rpt. in William Carlos Williams Review 13.1 (1987): 1-4. Print.
Willis, Patricia C. Rev. of Poems by William Carlos Williams and ed. by Virginia M. Wright-Peterson. William Carlos Williams Review 24.2 (2004): 8990. Print.

119
William Carlos Williams Review, vol. 30 nos. 1-2, Spring-Fall 2013 Texas Tech University Press