Add to ORKGThe industrialized early 20th-century society of William Carlos Williams' America drives ahead in pursuit of scientific knowledge and new technology, both creating and collaterally suffering broad-scale human calamity. Responding to the post-Depression and post- World War II era of America, Williams reports on a crisis in the field of letters: "the construction of our poems…is left shamefully to the past" (Essays 337). Such an ineffectual state of affairs for poetry is for Williams symptomatic of a more general crisis in human knowledge, the pursuit of which has been co-opted by political institutions and by industrial enterprise, which lack any artful linguistic or communicative elements. In updating the "construction" of poetry, Williams ...