William Carlos Williams. Kora in Hell. Boston, Four Seas, 1920.

“ here is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.” William Carlos Williams Prologue to Kora in Hell.

“Yes. Anything is good material for poetry. Anything.
I’ve said it time and time again.” William Carlos Williams. Interview, October 18, 1957.

Discontinuous, paratactic, fragmentary: prose poems, improvisations and commentary, Kora in Hell is a truly unique and exemplary experimental poem. Both the structure and the structuring myth of Kora (Persephone) “the legend of springtime captured” and the return of spring, are owed to Williams conversations with Ezra Pound, but the governing metaphor is one referring to Williams himself and his new poetic spring: “it is the woman in us/That makes us write:/Let us acknowledge it,/Men would be silent.”

The Prologue is a sort of Ars Poetica for Williams and contains what he felt about other poets and friends at the time, including T. S. Eliot who had just published “Prufrock:”

“I had a violent feeling that Eliot had betrayed what I believe in. He was looking backward; I was looking forward. He was a conformist with wit, learning which I did not possess. . . . But I felt that he had rejected American and I refused to be rejected. . .” William Carlos Williams. I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958)