Kora in Hell: Improvisations

2017 Reprint of 1957 Edition. Originally published in 1920 by The Four Seas Company. Williams, one of the most important poets of this century, wrote this book of prose-poetry in 1917. He reflects on daily events over the course of a year, his readings, thoughts, observations. For American poetry Kora in Hell provided an energetic, attractive, and puzzling model of a native “poet’s prose” that has continued to fascinate. The book contains twenty-seven chapters of poet’s prose. Written during World War I, the text is itself at war both with poetry as it had been traditionally conceived and with the expatriate wing of American modernism headed by Ezra Pound. Remains an important work to this day.