Abstract
The great interest of the last fifteen years or so of Williams’s life is to be found in his preoccupation with measure, and in his immense achievements in the poem after he had apparently finished Paterson in 1951. The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), the two books which preceded Paterson V consist almost entirely of poems in the three-tiered line, the measure he believed he had always been searching for (but which he modified in various ways for much of the work in his final book, Pictures from Brueghel (1962).
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Notes
Charles Olson, Projective Verse (Brooklyn N.Y.: Totem Press, 1959); reprinted in Olson’s more readily available Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1966) and partially in Autob.
In America, the physiological approach to versification dates back as far as Oliver Wendell Holmes’s essay, ‘The Physiology of Versification’. See Michael Weaver, ‘Measure and its Propaganda’, Cambridge Annual, 1964, p. 16.
Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961) esp. pp. 344–8.
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© 1982 Charles Doyle
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Doyle, C. (1982). ‘The Odorless Flower’. In: William Carlos Williams and the American Poem. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16839-2_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16839-2_13
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