Pictures From Brueghel : And Other Poems By William Carlos Williams : Collected Poems 1950-1962

William Carlos Williams could rightfully be considered the father of 20th-century -- and certainly contemporary -- American poetry, moreso than his University of Pennsylvania classmate Ezra Pound. He was, along with Pound, one of the leaders of the Imagist movement in the early decades of the last century. But by the time Spring and All was published in 1923 (featuring his famous "The Red Wheelbarrow"), Williams had broken with the Imagists and had embarked on a lifelong search to find a truly idiomatic line, one that drew its meter from the common rhythms and phrasings heard in everyday American speech. Pictures From Brueghel is a grand example of this search. The volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1963, a few months after Williams' death. It contains some of his most beautiful poems (in a career of beautiful poems), such as "The Woodthrush" and "Sonnet In Search of an Author." This New Directions edition also features the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" which W.H. Auden rightly called "one of the most beautiful love poems in the language."