William Carlos Williams, from "An Essay on Leaves of Grass," in Milton Hindus, ed., Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1955).

William Carlos Williams, recognized as among the greatest of the American modernist poets, reflects, in this essay, on the linguistic and cultural debt he owes to Walt Whitman. As a pioneer in the composition of free verse, Whitman stood as grandfather to the kind of innovative verse which Williams embraced, and which he saw as threatened by T. S. Eliot's conservative turn to older poetic forms. For Williams, Eliot's absorption in English history and culture was of a piece with his attitudes toward language, and represented a negative example for young writers in the United States. Williams, like Whitman, wanted to forge a new language adequate to a new American reality.

A new order had hit the world, a relative order, a new measure with which no one was familiar. The thing that no one realized, and this includes Whitman himself, is that the native which they were dealing with was no longer English but a new language akin to the New World to which its nature accorded in subtle ways that they did not recognize. That made all the difference. And not only was it new to America-- it was new to the world. There was to be a new measure applied to all things, for there was to be a new order operative in the world. But it has to be insisted on that it was not disorder. Whitman's verses seemed disorderly, but ran according to an unfamiliar and a difficult measure. It was an order which was essential to the new world, not only of the poem, but to the world of chemistry and physics. In this way, the man was more of a prophet than he knew. The full significance of his innovations in the verse patterns has not yet been fully disclosed.

The change in the entire aesthetic of American art as it began to differ not only from British but from all the art of the world up to this time was due to this tremendous change in measure, a relative measure, which he was the first to feel and to embody in his works. What he was leaving behind did not seem to oppress him, but it oppressed the others and rightly so.