With the 1985 publication of Charles Tomlinson’s edition of Williams’s Selected Poems, New Directions introduced a gathering larger and more comprehensive than the original 1963 edition. Opening with Professor Tomlinson’s superbly clear and helpful introduction, this selection reflects the most up-to-date Williams scholarship. In addition to including many more poems, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order. “It isn’t what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art,” Williams maintained, “it’s what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”