Paterson is a poem by influential modern American poet
William Carlos WilliamsWilliam Carlos Williams , also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine...
.
The poem is composed of five books and a fragment of a sixth book. The five books of
Paterson were published separately in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, and the entire work was published as a unit in 1963. This book is considered to be Williams' epic. Williams' book
In the American Grain is claimed to be
Paterson's abstracted introduction involving a rewritten American history. It is a poetic monument to, and personification of, the city of
Paterson, New JerseyPaterson is a city in Passaic County, New Jersey, United States. As of the United States 2000 Census, the city population was 149,222. Census population projections indicate a population of 146,545 as of 2007, making it New Jersey's third largest city. It is the county seat of Passaic County...
. However, as a whole the three main topics of the poem are Paterson the Man, Paterson the City, and Identity. The theme of the poem being centered in an in-depth look at the process of modernization and its effects.
Composition
Williams saw the poet as a type of reporter, who relays the news of the world to the people. He prepared for the writing of
Paterson in this way:
While writing the poem, Williams struggled to find ways to incorporate the real world facts obtained through his research into the poem. On a worksheet for the poem, he wrote, "Make it factual (as the Life is factual-almost casual-always sensual-usually visual: related to thought)". Williams considered, but ultimately rejected, putting footnotes into the work describing some facts. Still, the style of the poem allowed for many opportunities to incorporate factual information, such as in the letters received by Dr. Paterson. Williams, in fact, used portions of his own correspondence with the American poets
Marcia NardiMarcia Nardi was born Lillian Massell in Boston, Massachusetts. Nardi attended Girls’ Latin School and Wellesley College but decided to drop out of university in 1921 at which time she moved to Greenwich Village and remade herself as the poet Marcia Nardi...
and
Allen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet. Ginsberg is best known for the poem "Howl" , in which he celebrates fellow members of the Beat Generation and critiques what he saw as the destructive forces of materialism and conformity in the United States.-Early life and family:Ginsberg was born into...
in
Paterson.