A New Line

A New Line - context Summary

Paterson Published 1948

This three-line excerpt from Book 2 of Paterson appears within Williams’s long, civic epic about Paterson, New Jersey. Written into a project published in 1948, the lines assert that poetic innovation depends on a transformed perception: without "a new mind," one cannot produce "a new line." The fragment condenses Williams’s program linking local experience, observational attention, and formal renewal in American poetry.