that the new line is simply one manifestation of a pervasive shift of style and point of view." Whittemore, too, while heralding Williams as a prophet in the "Revolution of the Word," de-emphasized the role of the variable foot: "In other words the variable foot represented a change in mood more than measure." Williams's health accounts for a major change in mood. In the late 1940s he suffered the first of several heart attacks and strokes which would plague him for the rest of his life. And though Williams later complained of the effects of a particularly serious stroke (1952)--"That was the end. I was through with life"--his devotion to poetry did not suffer. Breslin reported that after retiring from medicine in 1951, and after recuperating from a stroke, Williams spoke "optimistically of the `opportunity for thought' and reading afforded by his new idleness." Hofstadter pointed out that "death was a major focus of this reflectiveness," and explained how Williams reflected his concerns in his poetry: "In the face of death what Williams seeks is renewal--not a liberation toward another world but an intensified return to this one. Revitalization both of one's inner energies and of one's contact with the outside world, renewal is the product of two forces: love and the imagination.... Love and imagination are the essence of life. He who loses them is as good as dead." Williams explored the theme of renewed love in two particular later works, the play A Dream of Love and the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." In A Dream of Love the protagonist has an affair with his secretary and confesses to his wife that he did it only to "renew our love." The explanation fails to convince her. Thus, Williams dramatizes his belief in the "conflict between the male's need for emotional renewal in love and the female's need for constancy in love," explained Guimond. According to Thomas Whitaker, "`A Dream of Love' points to an actuality that Williams at...
