Reproductions of his early letters, poems, manuscripts, and essays have provided scholars with new ways of thinking about Williams's local roots and international ambitions for almost four decades.

Since Theodora Rapp Graham and Emily Mitchell Wallace founded The William Carlos Williams Newsletter in 1975, The William Carlos Williams Review (as it became in 1980) has consistently turned its attention to the formative stages of Williams's genre-spanning career. Indeed, Williams specialists have long argued that his early prose not only reveals rich insights into his evolution as a poet, but also helped establish him as a major interlocutor in global debates about modernist aesthetics. 1 Although they are conspicuous in accounts of modernist versification, early polemics such as these can sometimes overshadow the subtle, sophisticated and intensely self-critical discussions of avant-garde poetics that Williams conducted in the first decade of his literary career. The proclamations that punctuate William Carlos Williams's earliest prose have become well-known to critics of modernism: outbursts such as 'nothing is good save the new' (I 23),'Rhyme was a language once, but now it is a lie' (EC 58) and 'I am in the field against the stupidity of the critics writing in this country about poetry today' (EC 62) became weapons with which he attacked his enemies, and clarion calls with which he rallied his allies.

Ycal mss 101 archives