Williams's fond tolerance of middle-class life. The Build-Up does have its "tough sections," Whittemore admitted, but "its placidness is striking for a book written by a long-time literary dissenter. What it is is a book of complacent reflection written from inside apple-pie America. It has not the flavor of the letters of the real young doctor-poet sitting in his emptiness forty years earlier in Leipzig.... Between 1909, then, and the time of the writing of The Build-Up WCW was taken inside, and found that with reservations he liked it there." One reservation Williams may have had about middle-class America--and Rutherford in particular--was its reception of him as a poet. Few in Rutherford had any awareness of who Williams-the-poet was, and beyond Rutherford his reputation fared no better: even after he had been writing for nearly thirty years, he was still virtually an unknown literary figure. Rod Townley reported a typical public response to his early works: "The world received his sixth and seventh books as it had the five before them, in silence." At times, Williams took a resilient view of his own obscurity. In a 1938 letter to Alva Turner (one of the many amateur poets with whom he frequently corresponded), Williams assessed the profits of the pen: "Meanwhile I receive in royalties for my last two books the munificent sum of one hundred and thirty dollars--covering the work of a ten or fifteen year period, about twelve dollars a year. One must be a hard worker to be able to stand up under the luxury of those proportions. Nothing but the best for me!" Beneath the shell of this attitude, though, lay a much angrier Williams. Obviously bitter about the success of Eliot and the attention Eliot stole from him and others, Williams wrote, "Our poems constantly, continuously and stupidly were rejected by all the pay magazines except Poetry and The Dial." As a result, Williams founded and edited several magazines of his own throughout the...
