Early and Late Style in Williams

Abstract This article addresses the question of stylistic transformation in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, examining the role of the concordance and, more recently, natural language processing, as tools for use in the course of stylometric analysis, and presenting Williams as an ideal candidate for consideration and comparison of early and late styles, giving due attention to Williams’s formative literary influences, the influence of the visual arts more generally, and Williams’s grammatical tendencies regarding adverbs, articles, conjunctions, and pronouns, both with reference to poetic peers and across his early and late work, with special attention devoted to poems including “This Is Just to Say” (1934) and “The Ivy Crown” (1955). In contesting the critical tendencies to demean or to minimize Williams’s stylistic shifts, this article addresses a number of significant and substantial transformations in Williams’s poetics, tracing them to specific aesthetic commitments and biographical circumstances, and hailing Williams as a disruptive figure who stood as a key innovator not only in early career, but also in late career, unafraid to change, or to be influenced by younger poets, and whose culminating disruption was to disrupt the prevailing modernist preference for disruption.