William Carlos Williams. Journey to Love.

New York: Random House, 1955.

8vo.;  beige cloth stamped in green and black; slightly rubbed at extremities of spine. In original dust jack; torn at tail of spine; frayed and torn along top edge. 

First edition. 

A finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry in 1956, Journey to Love was a late triumph of William Carlos Williams. It is dedicated to his wife. All of the poems are in triadic stanza form, sometimes “with a short fourth line to fill out the measure.” The crowning poem of the collection is “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” by far the longest piece in the volume at 30 pages. This four-part pastoral love poem was originally envisioned as the fifth book of Paterson. He began writing it in 1952 in the midst of health problems—physical (a heart attack and multiple strokes that left him, among other things, with periods of near-blindness and partially paralyzed, able to type only with one hand) and mental (depression). Facing death, he confessed old adulteries to his wife. In this context, he wrote one of the most beautiful affirmations of the power of love in—and against—the nuclear age, and one of the few memorable love poems in English written not for a mistress but for a wife” [Ann Fisher-Wirth, Encyclopedia of American Poetry].