Insisting (most famously with a red wheelbarrow) that the language of poetry should map the language of everyday life, William Carlos Williams played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century American poetry. The role was undertaken in tandem with his full-time career as a paediatrician, as Williams served for almost fifty years the people of Rutherford, Passaic and Paterson, New Jersey. The central question of Ian D. Copestake's The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry is why exactly Williams believed that his own work as a poet, particularly when brought into direct comparison with his other occupation of the highest social and cultural value, was of importance to himself and to others.

We might begin with Copestake's choice of title. “Ethics” denotes both the moral principles of an individual and those of a particular class or group, and the branch of philosophy dealing more generally with human values and conduct. In his treatment of Williams, Copestake is not pushed to distinguish which of these meanings has priority; he considers the poet's set of personal values (where the catch-cry “no ideas but in things” became a call to arms against the enemies of abstraction and engrained conservatism), the legacy of his upbringing in the Unitarian faith (Williams's parents were instrumental in establishing a Unitarian church in Rutherford), and the poet's further-reaching intuition to reject, in general, the dogmatic insistence upon a moral code.

Central to Copestake's reading is Williams's sense of the contribution his own relation to language might make in breaking down our reluctance to question or to challenge received notions and values. The poet's commitment to language, in Williams's view, is no less than a commitment to morality. Through careful readings of Williams's Paterson, Copestake demonstrates how Williams dramatized the struggles inherent in his life with language. Paterson, for Williams, was a self-reflexive exercise; its central ambition was to embody as fully as possible the squaring of the truth of the man with the truth of his work. Copestake's emphasis here is on Williams's theories of language and form, particularly the poet's focus on the materiality of language over ideas. Such theoretical emphasis is nicely balanced by analysis of individual poems, often leading the reader in novel and surprising directions (see 114–15 for Copestake's analysis of Williams's application of specific details of Einstein's relativity theories to the structure of Paterson).

Insightful also is Copestake's portrayal of Williams's relationship with such literary and intellectual forebears as Whitman, Emerson and Pound. Copestake portrays Williams's relationship with Emerson, in particular, as troubled, as the poet is torn between Emerson's ability to propound the importance of a native American literature and his status as a revered cultural icon who, rightly or wrongly, represented what emerging writers and critics felt needed to be swept away. Through Pound, Copestake argues, Williams began to release himself from reliance on models of the past. Once again, however, Copestake is alive to the tensions and complexities of intellectual relationship; Williams's stress on formal organization (over the clear assertion of meaning) is shown, ultimately, to measure his distance from Pound's poetics.

What emerges from Copestake's treatment of Williams is a man of honest and dedicated ambition, a poet continually struggling to find an appropriate form and structure for his poetic voice. Williams's poetry is shown to be an act of faith in the values he believed in and hoped to demonstrate to others. Over five thematized chapters, moving between intellectual context and textual analysis, the manifold complexities of Williams's intellectual and poetic legacy are given due attentiveness and care. This careful handling of the central subject, together with the directness of Copestake's approach (engaging with the “ethics” of a poet's poetry points to earlier, perhaps more romantic, models of literary criticism) offers a refreshing contribution to Williams studies, and to the broader scholarship of poetic modernism.