William Carlos Williams

"No poetry is more fresh, more immediate, more deftly challenging," writes editor Robert Pinsky. "William Carlos Williams is at the center of one of poetry's great historic flowerings." From the hard-edged experiments of Spring and All to the fluent lyricism of "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," Williams pursued an independent and often unappreciated course, creating a diverse and unfailingly vital body of work that has influenced generations of poets. As American as his formal opposite Robert Frost and as ambitious as his intellectual opposite T. S. Eliot, he forged a style that was flexible, intimate, and intensely observant, grounded in local particulars and yet steeped in poetry's most ancient traditions.