Modernist English-language poetry was originally shaped by the triumvirate of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams—all of them American. Each had a clear private agenda and a highly distinctive style. If Williams does not feature so prominently in the canon, it is probably because he eschewed European affectations and peregrinations, preferring to stay in his home town in New Jersey and work, as he put it, firmly ‘in the American grain’.

Williams alludes here to the traditional craftsmanship of US architecture, opposing it to Europe’s pompous cathedrals, the over-ornamentation of the Jugendstil, or the pared-down but still overbearing mass-produced aesthetic of Le Corbusier. His aim was to be a modernist poet in the mode of Frank Lloyd Wright, producing humble, carefully crafted work on a human scale; poems to be lived in, not monuments to ideology or flourishes to be shown off to aesthetically-minded patrons and fair-weather friends.