The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

This book is a reassessment of the poetic achievement of William Carlos Williams in the light of the influence of such visual arts movements as Cubism, Dada, Futurism and Precisionism. The author argues that Williams essentially developed his concept of the modern poem by adopting the revolutionary ideas propagated by painters and theoreticians in the wake of Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists. A series of detailed interpretations of Williams’ poems, embedded in the context of modern art in general, provides us with fresh insight into the work of one of the most important American poets of this century.