Allen Ginsberg’s Early Review of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson I

Abstract A twenty-year-old Allen Ginsberg published a review of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson Book One in a local New Jersey newspaper in 1946. Reprinting the review as an appendix here sheds light on, and raises questions about, the beginning of the relationship between Williams and Ginsberg, which would go through many vicissitudes in the following years. It also provides an occasion for reflecting on the reception of Williams’s poem by the citizens of Paterson, among whom Ginsberg somewhat uncomfortably counted himself. Ginsberg’s discomfort was part of a larger struggle to find his own voice as a writer, a struggle that Williams’s example helped him resolve.