Williams challenges what forms, borders, conventions, and proprieties? First the bluster of his :  this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested (S & All) and the apparent rejection literature as an expressivist art form.    Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images. (S & All) Writing is a searching about in the daily experience for concrete language that articulates something actual. No? Writing is a searching about in concrete language for an actual experience. Closer. And that there is a process of searching that goes on continually, from one book to the next, in the moves to engage with everyday subject matter with vocabulary and rhythms more associated with vernacular speech than poetic diction. 

More persuasive than the proposition of a "variable foot" to account for it all (which seems like a late life, rhetorical retreat) is: poetry: new form dealt with as reality in itself. (S & All)

Here we move beyond free verse, proposing a significance and power to all levels of language, in all configurations and not just those of established literary conventions. Then philosophically too it suggests that a poem (i.e. a form, a new arrangement of words) exists as a thing, a real object as much as a pot of marigolds or a stone stubbing the toe.  As a reader of Williams, I do not often get the sense of being the recipient of a communique. Nor is the staging of it such that one feels like an audience participant, a member of the crown fortunate enough to witness but without participating in the tragedy. 

When best, Williams connects this committed insight about the poem's form with a ground but not in a mere patriotic sense of Paterson, NJ or American speech and apple pie.  Williams' America is necessarily in formation, in struggle, a contest of identities, speeches, and cultures -- with that sense of growth or motion as always good, and unstoppable as spring emergence:

...Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken ("By the Road," S & All)

The profound change, the deep bivalent motion towards roots and towards the sky nicely circumscribes Williams' own trajectories.  The ways these poems think as well as feel, insisting on the full register as compatible with at least an American poetics opens doors. And so even with the problematic positioning of the female other in a poem like "For Elsie," a feminist DuPlessis will find in the work liberating precedents. 

Is the lack of a program a weakness? The range of it, written over five decades, can seem a scatter rather than a progress, especially if one digs past the greatest hits.  It lacks what the "workshop" sometimes calls a definitive voice. There are correlations, the poems of voyeuristic desire, the visual observations, the rants about social customs.  But the distance from Al Que Quiere to the late poems betokens a spirit not unlike Gertrude Stein's (and Picasso, I don't care who influences me so long as it is not myself), in the sense that to settle into an identity is no longer to be an artist.

The best of these poems discover themselves in the writing, through a dance with the forms of the language, rather than beginning with an idea and a plan.  This is the story perhaps too of Williams' career and a useful mantra for readers doing the work of truly engaging the poems.