William Carlos Williams. Paterson, Book I–V.

Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1946–58. 

5 vols., 8vo.; slightest age-toning; uniformly bound in grayish-cream-yellow cloth. Each volume in original printed dust jacket. 

First editions, volume 1 comprised 1063 copies (952 bound at publication date and 111 bound in April, 1948); volume 2 of 1009 copies (similarly handled); volume 3 of 999 copies; volume 4 of 995 copies; and volume 5 ambitiously appeared in 3,000 copies (1,500 on its 17 September 1958 publication date and 1,480 bound that December). Volume 1 signed by Williams’s editor James Laughlin on front free endpaper. Volume 5 signed by William Carlos Williams in a post-stroke hand on the front free endpaper.  

“I started to make trips to the area. I walked around the streets; I went on Sundays in summer when the people were using the park, and I listened to their conversation as much as I could. I saw whatever they did, and made it part of the poem.” 

In 1926, influenced by his reading of Ulysses, William Carlos Williams wrote an 85-line poem titled “Paterson”; it subsequently won the Dial Award. His intent was to do for Paterson, New Jersey, what Joyce had done for Dublin in Ulysses. Williams wrote, “All that I am doing (dated) will go into it.” In July 1933, he reattempted the theme in an 11-page prose poem, “Life Along the Passaic River.” By 1937, Williams felt he had enough material to start a large-scale poem on Paterson but realized that the project would take considerable time to complete. Moreover, his then-busy medical practice precluded his attempting such a project at that time. This did not stop Williams from taking some preliminary steps in the meantime. He wrote the poem “Paterson, Episode 17” in 1937 and would recycle it into the major work 10 years later. “Morning,” written in 1938, was another poem intended for Paterson. In 1939, Williams sent James Laughlin at New Directions an 87-page sheaf of poems labeled “Detail and Parody for the Poem Paterson.” This collection as such was not published. However, 15 of its “details,” titled “For the Poem Patterson” [sic], appeared in the collection The Broken Span, which New Directions released in 1941.

One reason Williams deliberated on Paterson was his longstanding concern about The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, which with its overall tone of disillusionment had tapped into a much larger sense of cultural ennui that had arisen in the aftermath of World War I and become a touchstone for the Lost Generation. As Margaret Lloyd states in her critical reappraisal of Paterson, “many critics and poets indicate their poetical inclinations by aligning themselves specifically with T. S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, and . . . Paterson was, from its very conception, intended to be a ‘detailed reply’ to the Eliot bias of modern poetry.” Williams also studied Pound’s Cantos [Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925; London: John Rodker, 1928; New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1934; London: Faber & Faber, 1937; Norfolk CT.: New Directions, 1940] for clues on how to structure the large work he had in mind. Muriel Rukeyser's US1 [New York: Covici Friede, 1938] caught Williams’s attention as well. He wrote to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky, “I've begun to think about poetic form again. So much has to be thought out and written out there before we can have any solid criticism and consequently well-grounded work here.”

In his preface to the revised edition of Paterson [Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1995], the editor Christopher MacGowan points out that, even with Williams’s protracted challenges in finalizing the poem’s form, he “seems to have always felt close to the point of solving his formal problems.” He promised it to Laughlin for the Spring 1943 book list of New Directions. He told Laughlin in April 1944 that Paterson was “near finished” and nine months later that it was “nearing completion.” Even after he had received the galley proofs of Book I in September 1945, Williams was dissatisfied and revised the work extensively. This delayed its appearance in print to June 1946. Subsequent volumes appeared in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958.

Paterson is Williams’s great long-form documentary work. It not only redefined subject matter, but prosody – Williams worked on it for years before finalizing the first volume, continually refining his use of the line outside of conventional meter. Its scale and its scope, and the fact that it was published in individual volumes over a long period of time (and not collected until 1963) complicated its reception, and its mosaic structure challenged readers perhaps more than Williams expected. Paterson was Cyril Connolly’s final selection in his choice of the 100 key books of The Modern Movement [London: Andre Deutsch/Hamish Hamilton, 1965]: “The long poem has many moods and includes quotations from letters by Pound and Ginsberg, large Seurat-like canvases of the Park on Sunday, intimate Bonnard-like interiors, uproarious comedy . . .  his poem is written with a deep aversion to all forms of pretentiousness, rhetoric or prepared effects; it runs eddying along, broken by old letters, bits of local history and limpid love lyrics.”