Elinor Nauen

Williams taught the same formal message at each ((college)): that the new poetry, esp. the new American poetry, would have to be "consonant—con-sonant—with our age and range of our physical understanding. It must sound with our age and sound new and vigorously." Alchemist of the word as he was, he was looking for a new formula that would allow others to see the nature and bondings of words in as radical a light as Einstein's theories had forced them to see the nature of reality in a way none could have suspected just a few generations earlier. It was the imagination itself which had invented a new world and had discovered new spatial and temporal dimensions within that world. And if the imagination could do that with nature it could certainly do that with words. Radical transformations in the nature of language and poetry were indeed possible.

Paul Mariani, WCW