SOURCE: “The Big Poem,” in Poetry, Vol. CLXX, No. 2, May, 1997, pp. 90–100.

In the following review, Murphy offers a positive assessment of Selected Poems, drawing attention to Williams's effective use of the long line.

The “big line” of C. K. Williams somehow invites the assumption that bigger must mean fuller, more capacious, even encyclopedic—that a big line makes a big poem. Certainly this is the thrust of the comments of Edward Hirsch, Michael Hoffman, and Robert Pinsky on the back of the Selected Poems. Williams did not discover the long line (think of Hopkins, or Langland, without it). It is not true that, because he chooses a big line, Williams can fit more of what thinking is into his poems, nor that the unconscious (which must be very big) is subjected to more “available light of language.” Thought has no size.

So, what is the big deal about...