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 never stopped 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 practice 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.
| ISBN: | 9780826357601 |
| Publication date: | 30th December 2016 |
| Author: | Bruce Holsapple |
| Publisher: | University of New Mexico Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 456 pages |
| Series: | Recencies Series: Research and Recovery in Twentieth-Century American Poetics |
| Genres: |
Literary companions, book reviews and guides Literary studies: poetry and poets |