Preface: William Carlos Williams's Rome

Until its publication by Steven Ross Loevy in a 1978 issue of the Iowa Review, William Carlos Williams's Rome existed only in manuscript form at the Lockwood Memorial Library poetry collection at SUNY Buffalo. Loevy, then a doctoral student in American literature at the University of Iowa, took the forty-six typed pages, as well as Williams's markings on them, and produced a splendidly edited version of the text that enabled scholars not only to have access to a previously unpublished work, but to see what only those who could view the original manuscript at the Lockwood would have seen: Williams's handwritten corrections, deletions, additions, and notations.

Unfortunately, Loevy's work and Williams's Rome never gained much of an audience. Critical response to Rome has been scant and sporadic, even within the community of Williams scholars, and not all of what has been said was prompted by the text's publication in the Iowa Review. In 1971, Mike Weaver noted Rome's connection to A Voyage to Pagany and Williams's analysis of American culture in the 1920s (44–45, 132–33). A decade later, Paul Mariani, drawing on Loevy's edition, quoted parts of Rome in his biographical account of Williams's 1924 trip to Italy (227–29). But for the most part, treatment of Rome has been relegated to brief references and mentions in passing. It is rare that scholars engage with the substance of the text even to the extent that Terence Diggory does in his page-and-a-half discussion of its Freudian elements (8–9), let alone give it the kind of prominence Brian Bremen does in his William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture (1993), which devotes half a dozen pages to the importance of Rome as "the crystallization of Williams's ideas about the body, medicine, history, and writing . . ." (114–20).

Given the centrality of Rome to study of Williams's "improvisational" texts of the 1920s, as well as its complex relationship to the uniquely American cultural vision Williams was trying to hammer out in In the American Grain and A Voyage to Pagany, it seems baffling that Rome continues to receive slight notice in scholarly discourse on Williams. Indeed, Loevy's 1978 introduction to the text, reprinted here, still provides the most useful historical, cultural, and biographical contextualization of Rome for first-time readers of the text. Also reprinted here is the sole extensive critical analysis of Rome, Peter Schmidt's essay "Chora in Hell: The Sewer Venus, Sexual Politics, and Williams's Improvisation 'Rome.'" First published in Cristina Giorcelli and Maria Anita Stefanelli's 1993 edited collection The Rhetoric of Love in the Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Schmidt examines "the connections between gender and geography—between Williams's meditations on genius and his investigation of the tension linking 'centers' and 'provinces' in culture in the Old World and the New" (p. 69 herein) But copies of Giorcelli and Stefanelli's collection, published by Edizioni Associate in Rome, are now about as difficult to come by as the summer 1978 issue of the Iowa Review, in which Rome first appeared. The William Carlos Williams Review is happy to bring these texts, along with Loevy's introduction, into view once again.