Previous studies of William Carlos Williams have tended to look only for the literary echoes in his verse. According to Bram Dijkstra, the new movements in the visual arts during the 1920s affected Williams's work as much as, if not more than, the new writing of the period. Dijkstra catches the excitement of this period of revolutionary art, reveals the interactions between writers and painters, and shows in particular the specific and general impact this world had on Williams's early writings.

Sayre, literary scholar and art historian, demonstrates that Williams' work, heavily influenced by painters and photographers of the Stieglitz circle, is actually founded in the visual dimension of the printed word and must be approached as both graphic design and the representation of visual experience itself. He traces Williams' preoccupation with a visual order of poetry from his early work to the sophisticated replacement of painting by words in Paterson, Book Five and Pictures from Brueghel. Shows how Williams came to conceive of the poem as a visual order within which the disarray of the American scene could be composed. He advances a substantially new conception of Williams, forcing readers to reconsider their views. ISBN 0-252-01059-0 : $12.95.

In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.