Paterson (poem) caught Williams' attention for its use, with a technical skill that seemed to rival Pound's in "The Cantos", of such diverse and seemingly prosaic materials as notes from a congressional investigation, an X-ray report and a physician's testimony on cross-examination. He wrote to fellow poet Louis Zukofsky, "I've begun to think about poetic form again. So much has to be thought out and written out there before we can have any solid criticism and consequently well-grounded work here." In 1944, Williams read a poem by Byron Vazakas in "Partisan Review" that would help lead him to solutions in form and
Paris: A Poem Paris: A Poem Paris: A Poem is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs. Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Although the title page of the first edition mistakenly has the year 1919, it was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed. In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's "Collected Poems", edited by Sandeep Parmar, which helped create more critical interest. The poem is a psychogeography of post-World War I Paris.