Rader has published widely in the field of twentieth-century poetry. He is chair of the Department of English and Communication Studies at Texas Lutheran University. In the following essay, he looks at Williams' use of synthesis and his connection to Walt Whitman.

Without question, William Carlos Williams is, along with Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound, one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century. He gained his reputation through a staggering series of relatively short poems that tend to explore a singular issue or image. Indeed, Williams is often linked to a group of poets called the Imagists, whose mission was to write poetry that did little else but evoke a picture. Pound's famous poem "In a Station at the Metro" lasts only two short lines, but creates a vivid picture of faces emerging from the Paris trains: "The apparition of these faces in the...