"No poetry is more fresh, more immediate, more deftly challenging," writes editor Robert Pinsky. "William Carlos Williams is at the center of one of poetry's greatest historical flowerings." A poet of astonishing range and inventiveness, Williams was at once a daring formal innovator, one of the band of modernists who transformed American poetry, and an intimate, sometimes savagely frank chronicler of the life and landscape of his native New Jersey.

From the beginning he pursued an independent course, creating a diverse and unfailingly vital body of work, from the hard-edged experiments of Spring and All to the fluent lyricism of "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." His influence on generations of poets has been indelible, and as this masterful new selection demonstrates, his poems retain their capacity to astonish and delight.