him the way the cult of third generation poets did when they adopted him as their father in poetry. "Paterson is our Leaves of Grass," announced Robert Lowell. "The times have changed." And indeed they had. The dominant school of poetry, the academic school of Eliot and Allen Tate, was giving way to what Whittemore called the fifties' "Revolution of the Word." Such poets as Lowell, Allen Ginsburg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creely, and Cid Corman found in Williams an alternative to the academics. As Bruce Cook explained, Williams "withstood the influence of Eliot, ignored the New Critics and the academic poets who followed their lead, and simply went his own way, his lines growing shorter, more austere, more pointed with each poem." With this style, reported James Dickey, he appealed to many aspiring writers who looked at his work and said, "Well if that's poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!" But while the younger poets, including the Beats, found a prophet, a father, and a personal friend in Williams, the old master was no easy critic. "It was Williams who told Ginsberg that `Howl' needed cutting by half," disclosed Linda Wagner. "It was Williams who argued with Denise Levertov about her sometimes too-poetic dict According to Williams himself, his own special gift to the new poets was his "variable foot--the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American." He revealed his enthusiasm over the variable foot in a 1955 letter to John Thirlwall: "As far as I know, as my forthcoming book [Journey to Love] makes clear, I shall use no other form for the rest of my life, for it represents the culmination of all my striving after an escape from the restrictions of all the verse of the past." Breslin, meanwhile, downplayed Williams's exuberance: "A reader coming to these poems [in The Desert Music and Other Poems] across the whole course of Williams's development will recognize ...
