Artless honesty

Stephen Burt schreibt einen Essay anläßlich der Neuausgabe der Gedichte von William Carlos Williams :

Description and ventriloquism, though, were his strengths: without them, the late poems grew weakly sententious, or mushy (‚No defeat is made up entirely of defeat – since/the world it opens is always a place/formerly/unsuspected‘), or artless in their honesty:

All women are fated similarly
facing men
and there is always
another, such as I,
who loves them,
loves all women, but
finds himself, touching them,
like other men,
often confused.

(‚To Daphne and Virginia‘)

Collected Poems: Volume I by William Carlos Williams. ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan | Carcanet, 579pp., £12.95, 28 December 2000

Collected Poems: Volume II by William Carlos Williams. ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan | Carcanet, 553pp., £12.95, 28 December 2000

London Review of Books , Volume 24 Number 5 | cover date 7 March 2002