This open-access, digital concordance to the poems of William Carlos Williams provides students, scholars, and general readers with a tool to search words in their linear occurrences in the standard editions of the poems. The concordance allows users to compare usage of selected terms and phrases as well as analyze word frequencies in the two-volume collected poems,
Paterson, and Williams’s translations of Spanish and Latin American poems.
The default search type is single term and is not case sensitive. Queries will include results from all of the collections and will be organized chronologically. The other search options are searching by volume and ordering the search results alphabetically.
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Single Term searches will match all lines that contain the search term.
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Searching by Phrase (a character string search) will match all lines that contain the entire search string.
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The Multi-Term search allows users to enter multiple words separated by spaces and will match lines that contain ALL of the given search terms in any order.
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The Any-Term search allows users to enter multiple words separated by spaces and will match lines that contain ANY of the given search terms.
Results include the number of instances of the search word and present the user with information about the occurrences of the word: the line(s) in which the term or phrase appears, the title of the poem, the collection, the page number, and the date of publication. (Line numbers for the book-length poem
Paterson are assigned by page number.) Users may then use the editor’s notes in the print editions to access relevant information about the textual history of individual poems.
The texts are the standard print editions, provided with permission of New Directions Press:
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909–1939, edited by A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (1986), cited as (CP I);
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939–1962, edited by Christopher MacGowan (1988), cited as (CP II); and
Paterson, Revised edition, edited by Christopher MacGowan (1992), cited as (P); and
By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959. Compiled and edited by Jonathan Cohen (2011), cited as (BWM).
The concordance was created by Nathaniel C. Todd-Long and Dr. Mark C. Long in 2021–2022. Please send comments, suggestions, or emendations to mlong@keene.edu.
