[T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens] are the two poets in the American Modern tradition one would least expect Williams to honor. Yet honor them he does and, in fact, he could be said to join their ranks. For in the seven years between the publication of the fourth and fifth books of Paterson, between 1951 and 1958, Williams and his poetry underwent a profound change.

In 1951 Williams suffered his first stroke and was forced to retire [from his medical practice]. Three years later he published The Desert Music and Other Poems, a transition volume marked on the one hand by energy, confidence, and curiosity in the "local" and on the other by an almost desperate confusion in the face of an exhausted and weak old age. Of these two extremes, marked by "The Desert Music" and "For Eleanor and Bill Monahan," "The Desert Music" came first. (pp. 133-34)

Written...