The Early Career of William Carlos Williams: A Critical Facsimile Edition of His Uncollected Prose and Manuscripts: Introduction

The proclamations that punctuate William Carlos Williams's earliest prose have become well-known to critics of modernism: outbursts such as "nothing is good save the new" (I 23),"Rhyme was a language once, but now it is a lie" (EC 58) and "I am in the field against the stupidity of the critics writing in this country about poetry today" (EC 62) became weapons with which he attacked his enemies, and clarion calls with which he rallied his allies.¹ Although they are conspicuous in accounts of modernist versification, early polemics such as these can sometimes overshadow the subtle, sophisticated and intensely self-critical discussions of avant-garde poetics that Williams conducted in the first decade of his literary career. Indeed, Williams specialists have long argued that his early prose not only reveals rich insights into his evolution as a poet, but also helped establish him as a major interlocutor in global debates about modernist aesthetics. Since Theodora Rapp Graham and Emily Mitchell Wallace founded The William Carlos Williams Newsletter in 1975, The William Carlos Williams Review (as it became in 1980) has consistently turned its attention to the formative stages of Williams's genre-spanning career. Reproductions of his early letters, poems, manuscripts, and essays have provided scholars with new ways of thinking about Williams's local roots and international ambitions for almost four decades.² This Thirtieth Anniversary Number of the Review seeks to commemorate this tradition by gathering together and examining the "forgotten" prose works that Williams produced in the buildup to the composition of Spring and All (1923)—his most cogent synthesis of his early poetics—but which have remained uncollected or unknown until now.³ Its ambition is to help answer a question that Williams posed in his breakthrough 1914 poem "The Wanderer: A Rococo Study:" "How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?" (CP1 28).

The facsimile edition that forms the centerpiece of The Early Career of William Carlos Williams begins this task with a chronological presentation of the published essays, translations, short stories and multimodal works excluded from Williams's standard prose collections, as they originally appeared. It also publishes for the first time previously-unknown essays, manifestos, and poems, as well as original and complete versions of early manuscripts that have appeared in various forms over the years. Essays by Gabriele Hayden, Christopher MacGowan, Randy Ploog, and Erin Templeton provide a critical framework for this formative body of work. Their articles shed important new light on the under-explored literary-historical contexts and neglected dramatis personae that made crucial but frequently overlooked contributions to Williams's development. Ploog, Nancy Kuhl and James Maynard also give valuable insights into the archival collections that house most of the pieces presented in this collection. And in the pages that follow, I will outline the rationale and editorial principles used to assemble this critical facsimile edition, tracing the network of ideas and methods that connect this astonishingly varied, and in some cases, highly experimental body of work. Throughout, I argue that the heterogeneity and marginal status of these previously-uncollected pieces embody the intricate designs of Williams's modernist project. When brought together as a collection, the "mirror" that his early prose holds up to "modernity" creates a dazzling, if sometimes bewildering array of reflective surfaces that captures perfectly the disjunctive energies of Williams's time.

The Early Career of William Carlos Williams was initially conceived as a scholarly convenience that gathered his elusive formative texts in one location with the ambition of reviving critical interest in them. However, as work on the edition progressed, correcting the "uncollected" status of these early prose works eventually became less important than understanding the reasons for that status, and indeed, the impact that their inaccessibility has had on studies of Williams's early career. As Williams himself noted, much of the interest in his early prose (and especially in the "Prologue" to Kora in Hell) concerned his relationships with other canonical modernists (see IW 30). Compared to "Prologue" and some of his later collections...