SOURCE: "Parade's End," in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, Random House, 1954, pp. 315-23.

Williams was one of America's most renowned poets of the twentieth century. Rejecting as overly academic the Modernist poetic style established by T S. Eliot, he sought a more natural poetic expression, endeavoring to replicate the idiomatic cadences of American speech. In the following essay, which was first published in 1951, he focuses on the significance of Sylvia in the transition of Christopher Tietjens throughout the novel, and suggests that Tietjens is not "the last Tory," but rather the first of a new, more enlightened generation of Englishmen.

Every time we approach a period of transition someone cries out: This is the last! the last of Christianity, of the publishing business, freedom for the author, the individual! Thus we have been assured that in this novel, Parade's End, we have a portrait of the last...