William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems Volume I reissued as a Carcanet Classic. Described by Thom Gunn as `an ideal edition’, this first volume of William Carlos Williams’ Collected Poems is a vivid account of his formation as a poet, his time in Europe, and his interactions with the major players of Modernism (he never quite appreciated that he was one of them). The poems are printed in the order of original publication, starting with The Tempers (1913) and ending with Poems 1936–1939. Williams remains one of the most popular American poets of all time, Whitman’s heir but with a voice wholly unlike Whitman’s: provincial, particular, never quite settled. His material is the stuff of daily life, though he takes big risks of theme: `the urgent insurgent now’ that he lives and celebrates becomes history; it can generate energy even from the past.

`Today it would be hard to find a reader of poetry who would not acknowledge Williams as one of the major American modernists.’ - Adam Kirsch; 'Williams sees the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder.' - Hugh Fox

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he began writing poetry while still a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.