lean years. Until the 1940s and after, when his work finally received some popular and critical attention, the magazines provided a small but important readership. While the many years of writing may have gone largely unnoticed, they were hardly spent in vain: Breslin revealed that "Williams spent some thirty years of living and writing in preparation for Paterson." And though some dismiss the "epic" label often attached to the five-book poem, Williams's intentions were certainly beyond the ordinary. His devotion to understanding his country, its people, its language--"the whole knowable world about me"--found expression in the poem's central image, defined by Whittemore as "the image of the city as a man, a man lying on his side peopling the place with his thoughts." With roots in his 1926 poem "Paterson," Williams took the city as "my `case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the `thought.'" In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained "that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody--if imaginatively conceived--any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions." A. M. Sullivan outlined why Williams chose Paterson, New Jersey: It was once "the prototype of the American industrial community... the self-sustaining city of skills with the competitive energy and moral stamina to lift the burdens of the citizen and raise the livelihood with social and cultural benefits." One hundred years later, continued Sullivan, "Williams saw the Hamilton concept [of `The Society of Useful Manufacturers'] realized, but with mixed results of success and misery. The poet of Paterson understood the validity of the hopes of Hamilton but also recognized that the city slum could be the price of progress in a mechanized societ...
