Selected Poems

Williams’s poetry is characterized by formal freedom — inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman — coupled with an imagistic conciseness; like Pound, Williams believed that concrete details need no explanation, that ideas must be embodied in images. His poems are full of everyday objects; they celebrate the ordinary and the seemingly trivial — though they do so in unfamiliar ways and often from a surprising perspective. This volume contains poems spanning three decades in Williams’s career.