Great Regulars: A chapter of [William Carlos] Williams's

Autobiography is titled "The Waste Land," but it contains only one paragraph about Eliot's poem: "Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot's genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him." Williams, who went directly from high school to medical school, was put at a disadvantage by Eliot's show of erudition. With American avant-garde writers generally, Williams claims, "literary allusions . . . were unknown to us.

from Adam Kirsch: The New York Review of Books: The New World of William Carlos Williams

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