Perhaps a less subjective appraisal came from Webster Schott, who defined Williams as "an immensely complicated man: energetic, compassionate, socially conscious, depressive, urbane, provincial, tough, fastidious, capricious, independent, dedicated, completely responsive.... He was the complete human being, and all of the qualities of his personality were fused in his writings." And, as Randall Jarrell pointed out, it is precisely in his written work where Williams demonstrates that "he feels, not just says, that the differences between men are less important than their similarities--that he and you and I, together, are the Little Men." Corresponding with Williams's attraction to the locale was his lifelong quest to have poetry mirror the speech of the American people. Williams had no interest, he said, in the "speech of the English country people, which would have something artificial about it"; instead he sought a "language modified by our environment, the American environment." Marc Hofstadter explained: "Thinking of himself as a local poet who possessed neither the high culture nor the old-world manners of an Eliot or Pound, he sought to express his democracy through his way of speaking.... His point was to speak on an equal level with the reader, and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his point of view." While Williams continued with his innovations in the American idiom and his experiments in form, he fell out of favor with some of his own contemporaries. Kora in Hell: Improvisations, for example, suffered some stinging attacks. For a year Williams had made a habit of recording something--anything--in his notebooks every night, and followed these jottings with a comment. One of "Williams's own favorite books..., the prose poetry of Kora is an extraordinary combination of aphorism, romanticism, philosophizing, obscurity, obsession, exhortation, reverie, beautiful lines and scary paragraphs," wrote W...
