The lost works of William Carlos Williams

About this book

In this book, Robert J. Cirasa contends that William Carlos Williams's The Collected Poems 1921-1931 and The Complete Collected Poems 1906-1938 are truly "lost" works of major accomplishment in the Williams canon. In each, Williams took as the basic element, or constituent sections, of these two large-scale literary structures the tacit lyrical sequences that had constituted his originally separate volumes of verse, also added new groupings as he made changes to the old, and fashioned them all into a unique series of lyrical sequence (a lyrical super-sequence) that gave unified lyrical definition and compelling lyrical immediacy to the whole of his poetic development. Together, the two works stand equal to Paterson in belying the still occasionally expressed view of Williams as primarily a miniaturist.