PRESENTATION COPY TO THE PRODUCER
WILLIAMS, William Carlos.
Paterson [Books 1, 2, 3 & 4].
Norfolk, New Classics, [1951]. [with:]
—. Paterson (Book Five). New York, New Directions, 1958.
Two vols, 8vo and large 8vo, pp. 238 and pp. [44]; with half-titles; good copies, in slightly worn jackets; bookplates of the poet and BBC producer D.G. Bridson.
£1250
US $1554 €1460
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First collected edition of Books One to Four and first edition of Book Five; inscribed on the front free endpaper of One to Four (in Williams’s distinctive scrawl, in two different pens after the first ran out of ink) ‘D.J. [i.e. G.] Bridson with my compliments / William Carlos Williams’.
Paterson was William’s masterwork, a fragmentary modernist epic about the New Jersey town of Paterson, his hometown, written over the course of three decades and published in five parts from 1948 to 1958. D.G. Bridson and Williams had shared the pages in various magazines in 1930s as well as in Pound’s Active Anthology in 1933 – Pound was a mutual friend for many years – and in October 1960 Bridson ‘collaborated with Donald Hall to introduce …. Paterson to English listeners’ (Bridson, Prospero and Ariel).
Connolly 100 (‘The long poem has many moods and includes quotations from letters by Pound and Ginsberg, large Seurat-like canvases of the Park on Sunday, intimate Bonnard-like interiors, uproarious comedy... his poem is written with a deep aversion to all forms of pretentiousness, rhetoric or prepared effects; it runs eddying along, broken by old letters, bits of local history and limpid love lyrics’).
