William Carlos Williams

'The alphabet ofthe treesis fading in thesong of the leaves' Filled with bright, unforgettable images, the deceptively simple work of William Carlos Williams revolutionized American verse, and made him one of the greatest twentieth-century poets. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Prose essays ranging in theme from Erik the Red and Christopher Columbus to Abraham Lincoln about what it means to be an American. William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. He found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning, new configurations of character and intent. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and the result is a genuinely consistent and integrated expression of the American inheritance. Williams did not invent the native conscience, but he rediscovered it, often in the more remote gestures of history, and has here given it enduring stature in prose. "In the American Grain is a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature ." -- Times Literary Supplement

La poesía esencial de William Carlos Williams, un clásico de la literatura americana del siglo XX, por primera vez en castellano y en un solo volumen. William Carlos Williams es, junto a Wallace Stevens y Marianne Moore, uno de los grandes poetas estadounidenses del siglo xx. Su poesía, transparente y memorable, llena de imágenes inolvidables y caracterizada por la búsqueda de un verso capaz de reproducir el habla americana, es una fuente inagotable de emoción y reflexión. En este volumen, Lumen reúne, por primera vez en castellano, el cuerpo esencial de su obra poética:Kora en el infierno, inédita hasta ahora en nuestra lengua,Viaje al amor, Cuadros de BrueghelyLa música del desierto, traducidos por Edgardo Dobry y Juan Antonio Montiel, que también firma la introducción.

Opening with Professor Tomlinson's superbly clear and helpful introduction this selection reflects the most up-to-date Williams scholarship. In addition to including many more pieces, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order. It isn't what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art," Williams maintained, "it's what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

Valérie Rouzeau, translator. Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination — a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and Section XXII, where Williams wrote his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Considered by many to be the most characteristically American of our twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams "wanted to write a poem / that you would understand / ,,,But you got to try hard―." So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.

A William Carlos Williams poem from The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 2: 1865 to the Present, Shorter 8th Edition.

The famous poem "The Widow’s Lament in Springtime" by William Carlos Williams.

Williams was foremost a poet, but the novels are of great interest. They are important books in their own right, because they present with a poet’s insight, and in a prose style of striking originality, aspects of American life which few other writers have approached. White Mule and its sequels, In the Money and The Build-Up, form a trilogy, the saga of the Stecher family, but each volume is a complete novel by itself. Joe Stecher and Gurlie, his wife, are a young couple of European origin settled in New York at the turn of the century and working to make a place for themselves in the new world. White Mule is the story of Joe’s inner struggle between love of fine craftsmanship (he is a printer by trade) and Gurlie’s ambition to get ahead, to have him get “in the money.” But it also the story of the awakening consciousness of their children; the real heroine is the baby Flossie––she had a kick like “White Mule” whiskey––whose birth begins the book. Everything revolves around the baby and she is surely unique in literature. Dr. Williams was a pediatrician, and without sentimentality he makes of this little being, who cannot even talk, a full-scale, three-dimensional personality.