Shapiro Is All Right

(Editors’ 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 kaleidosope.
A red wheelbarrow, a stone, a purple plum,
Things of a fixed world, metaphysics strange
As camera preception, in which no change
Occurs in any image. And prosody yields
To visible inzvariables; motion fails,
And metric, a fallacy in a static mold
Freezes itself to dazzling shapes, grows cold.)