Introduction

Summary

What's in a name? It was a matter of some importance to Wystan Hugh Auden, Edward Estlin Cummings, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Robert Lee Frost, Marianne Craig Moore, Ezra Loomis Pound and William Carlos Williams. Only one of these specified that a full name appear on title pages. With that single exception, they wished to distinguish themselves from such turn-of-the-century lightweights as Pauline Florence Brower, John Vance Cheney, Theodore Eugene Oertel and Anna Spencer Twitchell. Wallace Stevens had no middle name and probably never entertained thoughts of nominal streamlining. Hilda Doolittle, also lacking a middle name, went one better by letting Ezra Pound reduce her signature to initials. “H.D.” saw the advantage in taking a new name that did not specify a gender. But the choice also signaled a commitment to a new kind of poetry.

By 1915 it was understood that the reduction of one's name to something less than the full panoply of the birth certificate meant that you were casting your lot with the revolutionary poets. Williams in fact seems to have anticipated the practice in his first publications. Christopher J. MacGowan notes that Williams contributed four line drawings to his 1906 medical school yearbook under the signature “W. C. Williams” (1984: 3). Three years later, the cover of his privately published Poems advertised the author once again as “W. C. Williams.” By 1912, however, the name he offered to the readers of the Poetry Review in London was “William Carlos Williams”.