About this Book

Sayre, literary scholar and art historian, demonstrates that Williams' work, heavily influenced by painters and photographers of the Stieglitz circle, is actually founded in the visual dimension of the printed word and must be approached as both graphic design and the representation of visual experience itself. He traces Williams' preoccupation with a visual order of poetry from his early work to the sophisticated replacement of painting by words in Paterson, Book Five and Pictures from Brueghel. Shows how Williams came to conceive of the poem as a visual order within which the disarray of the American scene could be composed. He advances a substantially new conception of Williams, forcing readers to reconsider their views. ISBN 0-252-01059-0 : $12.95.