Collected Poems I: 1909-1939

First published by Carcanet in Britain in 1987, then by Paladin in 1991, Williams' two volumes of "Collected Poems" comes home to Carcarnet for a re-issue in January 2001. Volume I opens with "The Tempers" (1913) and ends in 1939, the self-acknowledged turning point in Williams' career when his focus on poetic experimentation resulted in Paterson. Volume II takes up the story from 1939 until the year before Williams' death. "Collected Poems" does adhere to the chronological form of previous editions and is accompanied by the author's comments on the text.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883- 1963) was the great American contemporary of those other great American poets who went to Europe - Pound, H.D. and Eliot (for whom he felt a settled aversion). Staying at home, pursuing a serious medical career alongside his poetic vocation, Williams came to epitomise the other modernism which sought to build an American poetry out of American English and, as it were, in the teeth of traditions received from abroad. He wrote plays, novels and major prose works (in particular, In the American Grain) as well as poems.