When he wrote his Autobiography in the 1940s, William Carlos Williams presented his younger brother Edgar Irving Williams as little more than a sibling rival whom he loved but eventually outstretched. Williams's complete letters to Edgar, however, tell a different story. From 1902 to 1912 Williams's greatest epistolary partner was not Ezra Pound, Charles Demuth, or any other would-be modernist, but the brother he called `Bo', a talented, prize-winning architect who was more likely to become the celebrated artist in the Williams family than William himself.¹

Prior to the publication of `The Wanderer' in 1914, the poem that heralded his distinctive modernist voice, Williams struggled for a full decade with competing cultural, artistic, professional and fraternal differences. It was a struggle that manifested itself in fits and starts, successes and setbacks, all of which he shared with Edgar.

As a university student in 1902, Williams's sense of poetics imitated the romantics of Palgrave's Golden Treasury, but his desire to be a physician and a writer was the result of the progressive Unitarianism in which both boys had been raised; the artist would see `beauty', the professional would know `truth', together they formed a cultured man. From 1906 to 1909, the years within which he worked as a doctor in Hell's Kitchen, published his first book, Poems, and travelled to Leipzig, Germany, Williams struggled to compete with his brother.² Yet, never once (contrary to the story that they separated over their mutual love for Charlotte Herman) ...