SOURCE: "Shapiro is All Right," in William Carlos Williams, Random House, 1955, pp. 258-62.

In the following essay, originally published in 1946, Williams offers a positive assessment of Essay on Rime.

(Editor's Note: William Carlos Williams is treated by Shapiro as an "objectivist" poet, in part as follows:

 And (if this is not irrelevant) I for one
Have stared long hours at his discoveries
That seem at times the germs of serious science.
At times the baubles of the kaleidoscope.
A red wheelbarrow, a stone, a purple plum,
Things of a fixed world, metaphysics strange
As camera perception, in which no change
Occurs in any image. And prosody yields
To visible invariables; motion fails,
And metric, a fallacy in a static mold
Freezes itself to dazzling shapes, grows cold.)
Kenyon Review, 1946 

Suppose all women were delightful, the ugly, the short, the fat, the intellectual, the stupid, even the old—and...