A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.

Critics have routinely voiced their frustrations with William Carlos Williams’s term ‘measure’. But from the late 1930s onwards, he compared his idea of ‘measure’ to the science of measurement. This chapter suggests, first, that to fully appreciate Williams’s measure, one must understand how the science of measurement frequently appeared in the vocabulary of a variety of contemporaneous critics of poetry. In so doing, it sketches a lineage of scientific criticism that began in the late nineteenth century and that shaped modernist theories of prosody. Second, by close reading Williams’s long poem Paterson (1963), it suggests that by rejecting the term ‘rhythm’ and reprising ‘measure’, Williams was attempting to define the knowledge practices proper to poetry in an era where to measure was to know.