The Desert Music and Other Poems de WILLIAMS, William Carlos - 1954

New York: Random House, 1954. A near-fine copy with light toning to the spine of the jacket; a few small smudges on the cloth. 8vo. 90 pages. Original pale green cloth; printed dust jacket. First edition of Williams's late lyrical masterwork, collecting five-years of work, and signed on the front free endpaper in his characteristic post-stroke shaky hand.

The Desert Music shows William's continued evolution of the variable foot, his triadic "step-down-line" developed in the 1940s (particularly in Paterson). He based the concept on the idea that each line corresponds exactly to one single breath unit - unlike cadence, the length of the line corresponds to a colon, so it is an isocolic rhythmical pattern. It was, in his estimation, the culmination of a lifelong search for a new form of prosody. Included in The Desert Music is the superb poem "The Orchestra" ending with one of the poet's greatest condensations of his belief in the power of the artist: "THE BIRDS TWITTER now anew / but a design / surmounts their twittering. / It is a design of a man / that makes them twitter. / It is a design." Wallace A38. (410054).