Published the same year as The Waste Land and a deliberate counter-argument to it. Where Eliot fled to European high culture, Williams insisted on "No ideas but in things." The red wheelbarrow, the plums in the icebox, the doctor's intimate observations of his patients: Williams built a distinctly American modernism from local particulars. His "variable foot" influenced Ginsberg, O'Hara, the New York School, and half the American poetry that followed.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.