William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams' poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell in Poetry and the Age, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, John Xiros Cooper found that "Williams's poetics are uniquely physical. For him...