With due allowance for Williams' infirmities, haste, and pleasure in writing it, the Autobiography is still a baffling performance. It seems to proceed by fits and starts, as if Williams kept losing interest or the pathway as he recreated his past…. Williams' narrative rambles along, stopping to admire the intense blue of monkshood here, the facade of Rheims Cathedral there, to retail a piece of gossip or a childhood escapade, or to insert excerpts from Charles Olson's essay on Projective Verse, a document he approved because it validated his own experiments with rescuing the poetic line from stodginess. Like young Bill in the swing, he rocks back and forth, back and forth, the captive of no single mood, indifferent to longueurs, appearing to admit all memories on equal footing and trusting to some invisible principle of coherence, or the reader's indulgence.

"It can't all be told," or "That's...