ABSTRACT
As noted by Stevens there is much text for his outline of a poetics in the verse of Williams. Their friendship, both personal and literary, had its base in their ambition for poetry, their mutual agreement on its "importance", to use Stevens' word. If anything Williams' claim was stronger. The energy of the poem is not in a hymn to the common and universal but rather in the push downward to the place where such an affirmative response might be most challenged. It either does or does not come, one might say, as if Williams were leaving it to others to make the discovery where it is not a matter of argument but a sudden epiphany. For Williams it was not the sins of effete esthetics or the tired dreams of romanticism that made him expound reality. There is of course a good deal more that needs to be said for all three of these very strong poems.
