Abstract
Even before he finished the last part of Paterson as he had originally conceived it-with its four-part structure--Williams was already thinking of moving his poem into a fifth book. The evidence for such a rethinking of the quadernity of Paterson exists in the manuscripts for Book IV,1 for there Williams, writing for himself, considered extending the field of the poem to write about the river in a new dimension: the Passaic as archetype, as the River of Heaven. That view of his river, however, was in 1950 premature, for Williams still had to follow the Passaic out into the North Atlantic, where, dying, it would lose its linear identity in the sea of eternity, what Williams called the sea of blood. The processive mode of Paterson I-IV achieved, however, Williams returned to the untouched key: the dimension of timelessness, the world of the imagination, the apocalyptic moment, what he referred to as the eighth day of creation.
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