Long recognized as a masterpiece of modern American poetry,
William Carlos Williams' Paterson is one man's testament and
vision, "a humanist manifesto enacted in five books, a grammar
to help us to live" (Denis Donoghue). Paterson is both a place -
the New Jersey city near which Williams lived - and a man: the
symbolic figure in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the
public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four
books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the
structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the
course of the Passaic River, whose life seemed more and more to
resemble my own: the river above the Falls, the catastrophe of
the Falls itself, the river below the Falls and the entrance at
the end into the great sea." Book Five, published in 1958, when
the poet was seventy-five, affirms the triumphant life of the
imagination, in spite of age and death. This edition has been
completely re-edited by noted Williams scholar Christopher
MacGowan of the College of