WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Paterson.

‘A Man in Himself is a City’

WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions Books. 1946–1958.

Five volumes, 8vo. Publisher’s tan cloth boards titled in gilt to upper board, title superimposed on narrow rectangles (black, green, dark blue, sienna, and orange respectively to each volume) stamped across boards and spine, foredges untrimmed, all volumes in the original uncut dust-jackets, New Directions Books subscription request slip loosely inserted to vol. I; jackets with some light toning, verso of jackets with some offsetting from coloured rectangles and a few light spots, vols I and II have some light spotting to cloth; very minor offsetting to pastedowns; a sharp and attractive set, near fine.

First editions, first impressions, in uncommonly fine condition, of Williams’ great American epic, a landmark of twentieth-century poetry.

Composed of five books and a later fragment of a sixth, Paterson was issued in five separate volumes in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958, before the work was collected in a single volume in 1963. Growing out of a much shorter 1926 poem Williams wrote after reading Joyce’s Ulysses, Paterson evolved over several decades, reflecting Williams’s ambition to forge a distinctly American poetic idiom, sound and structure: an American epic circumventing the referential density, allusiveness, and essentially European literary traditions exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s The Cantos.

The work takes its title from the New Jersey city where Williams lived and practised medicine for much of his life (he would occasionally draft poems on prescription blanks), a profession that brought him into closer contact with the everyday and quotidian than most of his literary peers. He strongly believed that industrial America could sustain an epic of its own. For Williams, the city was ‘my “case” to work up[,] call[ing] for a poetry such as I did not know […]’.

Wallace A24a, A25a, A30a, A34a, and A44a.

SKU: 2122836