William Carlos Williams. The Wedge.

Cummington: Cummington Press, 1944.

12mo.; age-toned; orange paste-paper boards; spine sunned; rubbed; lightly bumped.

Limited edition of 380 copies printed on Dacian paper.

A pocket-sized collection of Williams’s poetry intended to be carried by US servicemen during World War II. Despite the poet’s inquiries and the nature of the requests that prompted him to approach them, several publishers rejected The Wedge. Their grounds for doing so were a perceived lack of literary quality and wartime shortages. The book was eventually handset printed by Henry Duncan and Wightman Williams at Cummington Press and bound surreptitiously on the premises and at the expense of one of the publishers who had previously rejected it. The book is dedicated to poet Louis Zukofsky, who helped Williams revise and rearrange the poems for publication.

Williams’s original concept for The Wedge was for it to contain several forms of writing. These would include improvisational works he wrote in the 1920s, prose and selections from his play Many Loves. Eventually, with Zukofsky's assistance, Williams narrowed the book's focus. He reduced the book's material, eliminated the prose selections but added an introduction based on an address he gave at the New York Public Library in October 1943. 

Many of the poems in The Wedge, composed during the late 1930s, were initially intended for the book-length poem Paterson. It is even a direct predecessor: the poem “Paterson: the Falls” lays out both the later poem's theme and its eventual format. Williams wrote to poet and publisher James Laughlin in 1943, “Paterson is coming along—[The Wedge] is a personal finger-practicing to assist me in that: but that isn't all it is.”