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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
In 1928 Ezra Pound described William Carlos Williams as an ‘observant foreigner’ who ‘starts where an European would start if an European were about to write of America: sic: America is a subject of interest, one must inspect it, analyse it, and treat it as subject.’ If Pound was right, Williams was a native-born outsider, a life-long resident alien giving America the serious attention of his life's work. The detachment and close attention noted by Pound as originating in Williams's sense of his own ‘foreignness’ (a sense which Williams obliquely admitted by his insertion of a relevant letter of Pound in the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell), are constants in Williams's work. Both the Imagist and Objectivist phases of his career show his determination to capture in words ‘the local fully realized’ – Williams's definition of ‘the classic’. In his trilogy of novels, his exploration of ‘the local’, ‘the only thing that is universal’ is shown both in theme and technique.
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25 Ibid.
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