Paterson: William Carlos Williams's Image of the City Adam R. McKee FLORI DA STATE U N IVERSITY A city is a multi-purpose, shifting organization, a tent for many functions, raised by many hands and with relative speed. Complete specialization, final meshing, is improbable and undesirable. The form must be somewhat noncommittal, plastic to the purposes and perceptions of its citizens. -Kevin Lynch, fhe Image of the City,91 . l'm in process of writing a book, the book I have contemplated doing for many years-prose and verse mixed: "hterson"-an account, a psychological-social panorama of a city treated as if it were a man, the man hterson. -William Carlos Williams to Robert McAlmon, I August 1943. (5L216). -T", idea behind the poem Paterson was somethingWilliam Car- I los Williams contemplated for almost twenty years during the I prime of his poetic career. As noted in the 1943 letter to Robert McAlmon, Williams's poem would also become the primary literary output of the last twenÇ years of his life as it was published in five books from 1946 to 1958 (though the original plan was for four books only), and remaining unfinished at the time of his death in 1963 as indicated by the presence of notes for a sixth book. This magnum opus has drawn much critical attention, leading Paul Mariani to call the poem "the most radically experimental and successful long poem writ- ten in our time" (233). However, much of the critical attention paid to the text has underplayed or disregarded the central thematic characteristic of the text: how to best represent the form and image of the modern urban environment and its so- cial spaces. The view of the urban form and the question of how best to represent Wíll¡am Carlosw¡ll¡ams Review, vol.31 no.2, Fall 2o'14 OTexasTech Unìversity Prss 141