William Carlos Williams has been considered one of America's foremost modernists, perhaps the quintessential avant-gardist, one who has had a profound influence on subsequent generations of writers. Throughout his life Williams espoused the creation of a unique American art at the same time that he was keenly interested in avant-garde developments from abroad. Paris in particular was a part of his imagination from an early age. His mother had studied painting there as a young woman, only to be called home to the Caribbean when the family money ran out. Marriage and children in alien New Jersey frustrated her ambition to be a portraitist. In 1897 she took her two sons abroad for a year, part of which time they were schooled in Paris. The 1913 Armory Show in New York introduced Williams to the painters of the French avant-garde, and he actually met a number of them when they...