The Birth of the Imagination: Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century

William Carlos Williams first spoke to the issue of form shortly after the publication of The Wanderer in 1914 his move to vers libre and didn t stop talking about form until his death in 1963. His poetry shows, decade after decade, persistent formal innovation. Bruce Holsapple s The Birth of the Imagination relates the form, structure, and content of Williams s poetry to demonstrate how his formal concerns bear upon the content, namely, how form testifies to a vision that the style verifies. Tracing the development of Williams s work from Poems in 1909 through The Wedge in 1944, Holsapple aligns emerging aesthetic concepts and procedures with shifts in Williams s writing to disclose how meaning becomes refigured, affecting what the poems say. While focusing primarily on Williams s experimental works, including the novellas, this innovative study charts how significant features in Williams s poetry result from specific imaginative practices."