William Carlos Williams, “The Young Housewife,” in The Collected Poems
of William Carlos Williams, vol. 1, 1909–1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher
MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 57. “The Young Housewife” was ¤rst
published in the 1916 issue of Others and in book form in Al Che Quiere (1917).
See Reuben A. Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). Brower’s method was to take a poem like
Donne’s Extasie and show that the central metaphor of “interanimation” controls the
structure of the whole poem: every word and image underscores the basic notion of
interrelatedness. Or again, in The Tempest the key design is metamorphosis, the “sea
change” that makes everything “rich and strange.” And so on.
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971),
404, and see 397–99.
My scansion is a simpli¤ed version of the standard Trager-Smith scansion us-
ing four stresses: primary (/), secondary (/), tertiary () and weak ( ). A caesura is
indicated by a double bar (||), a lesser pause by a single bar (|) For an extended analy-
sis of Williams’s prosody, see my “ ‘To Give a Design’: Williams and the Visualization
of Poetry,” in William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono:
National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1983), 159–86.
James E. B. Breslin, William Carlos Williams, An American Artist (1970; rpt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 51–52.
Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 58.
Gertrude Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” in Writings, 1903–1932 (New
York: Library of America, 1998), 308–09.
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 163.
See John Barrell, “Subject and Sentence; The Poetry of Tom Raworth,” Criti-
cal Inquiry 17 (winter 1991): 386–409; Colin MacCabe, “Dissolving the Voice,” Review
of Raworth, Writing, Times Literary Supplement, 30 December 1983: 1455.
