William Carlos Williams: Three Essays

Three essays celebrating and exploring the whole of William Carlos Williams' poetic career. The first looks at poems featuring a dog or a cat, and how for Williams these creatures embodied two different kinds of creative energy he sought in poetry (rambunctious rule-breaking vs. poise and precision). The second essay gives a deep reading of Williams' 1938 lyric "These," placing it in the penseroso or melancholic ode tradition of Keats, Milton, and others. The third evaluates Williams' lifetime of translating poets from Latin America (including the Caribbean) and Spain. It assesses the poems and poets themselves, the translations Williams did, and their influence on his own poetry. Williams' Spanish translations have finally been edited and collected in one volume by Jonathan Cohen: By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 (New Directions, 2011).