William Carlos Williams first spoke to the issue of form shortly after the publication of The Wanderer in 1914--his move to vers libre--and didnt stop talking about form until his death in 1963. His poetry shows, decade after decade, persistent formal innovation. Bruce Holsapples The Birth of the Imagination relates the form, structure, and content of Williamss poetry to demonstrate how his formal concerns bear upon the content, namely, how form testifies to a vision that the style verifies. Tracing the development of Williamss work from Poems in 1909 through The Wedge in 1944, Holsapple aligns emerging aesthetic concepts and procedures with shifts in Williamss writing to disclose how meaning becomes refigured, affecting what the poems say. While focusing primarily on Williamss experimental works, including the novellas, this innovative study charts how significant features in Williamss poetry result from specific imaginative practices.
