Foreword to The Manuscripts and Letters of William Carlos Williams

by Neil Baldwin and Steven L. Meyers

No simple comment suffices in an attempt to make clear the persistent and extraordinary value of William Carlos Williams' work as a writer. Public estimation came late for him, in some respects, but it is clear from the outset that his own peers, as Ezra Pound and the slightly younger Louis Zukofsky, took him as unique measure of the possibilities of the art they shared. For the then younger generation—Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan—he continued, as Olson put it, the one clean source in an activity often perverted by topical advantage and self-publicizing. For those of my own age, as Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, he was intensely responsive and reassuring, always there to answer the endless letters we wrote to him, despite failing health in the latter years of his life. He was truly our hero, and we knew that he would hear us.

In The Autobiography he recollects the circumstances that resulted in the present collection of his manuscripts and related materials:

Charles Abbott came to see us one winter's day about ten years ago. We sat in our front room all afternoon, Floss, he and I, over a highball or two, staring into a wood fire in our grate, letting the light fade. We hardly moved other than to refill our glasses. The phone didn't ring once. We thought we were in heaven.

He told us of his project: to collect manuscripts of the living poets,

English and American—whatever could be had—material that as often was thrown away or lost that could be used later to piece out an understanding of their lives and methods of work. He had written asking me if I had anything of the sort lying about the house that I could give him for the Lockwood Memorial Library at the University of Buffalo where a room had been set aside for the collection.

Generously, enthusiastically, Williams accepted the invitation, very possibly a singular one for him at that time. So it was that, from time to time, bulky brown envelopes filled with his work drafts began to arrive in Buffalo for deposit at the University Library, and, as the years passed, their accumulation resulted in the most extensive collection of Williams materials that we now have.

What is their value? Williams himself, I think, makes it very evident: "material . . . that could be used later to piece out an understanding of their lives and methods of work." Whether one be literary historian or critic, or writer, or, most appropriately, a student—whose world has not as yet coalesced into professional habit—a very simple piece of paper, with words scrawled or typed in unequivocal impulse, can be wonder beyond all others. There it literally is, that's how he did it!

But it is not merely explanations one is after. Such are all too simple and will no doubt change too, as readers and the worlds in which they live. The virtue of what Williams wrote is equal to the virtue of the diverse flowering earth he loved. Both change endlessly, to remain the same. In that sense there will never be a finally right answer, nor will these materials yield it.

Rather, it is the intimate revelation possible, when one can so witness the issue of such words as he did write by means of an agency as movingly common as a man's own two hands. The human dimension becomes so dearly manifest, and all pretensions of formula or abstract objectification fall away.

Although many indeed did make use of the materials here catalogued previous to this present recording of them, the two young men who have finally done this painstaking and perceptive labor are to be honored and thanked. Clearly their knowledge of Williams is now intimate in the sense I have used that word. Put briefly, they cared—and, as Williams might well have told them, all you can do with caring is to make it an act , such as theirs.