Few poems have ever been priced as high as William Carlos Williams' Paterson, if one may borrow the central metaphor of Book III in order to suggest the enormous cost in concentration which must be met before any adequate evaluation can be made. If this work were built around a consistently presented hero—the Paterson of the title—that cost might not be so prohibitive as many readers will find it; but when Williams asserts in the introduction to Book III (“The Library”) that Paterson is not only the hero but also the heroine, not only a city but also cliffs and waterfall, one cries out for a critic to assist him, as the sea-god did Peleus, in conquering the metamorphic problem. Before judging the total merit of Paterson, however, one must weather a preliminary season of understanding, of looking hard and often at aim and structure—in brief, of giving the poem the creative reading that such an undertaking deserves. The poet, realizing the difficulty of meeting this high cost, has given some measure of help in the headnote to the entire poem, and also in the list of topics which he places immediately after the words Book One, as if in apposition; the latter consists of eighteen phrases separated by semicolons, each phrase a possible definition of Paterson. The last of these phrases, and one which may well supply a key-quotation for this essay, is “a dispersal and a metamorphosis.”