In the Prologue to his Kora in Hell: Improvisations, William Carlos Williams intimates a kinship of sorts with Wallace Stevens as the other American modernist poet who ‘stayed at home’ and chose not to ‘run to London’ as Pound and Eliot had done. Yet, in terms of an American locale as a poetic, Stevens and Williams more often emerge as sparring partners than as partners. Stevens' poem of 1945, ‘Description without Place’, where ‘the theory of description matters most’ and where ‘It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self’ was greeted with indignation by Williams, who had argued as early as 1921 that ‘If Americans are to be blessed with important work it will be through intelligent, informed contact with the locality which alone can infuse it with reality’, and who had gone on to argue in 1925 in his In the American Grain that America has seldom been realised as a place, but more often as an ideal or myth, as a description without, or independent of, place.