Passaic River." By 1937, Williams felt he had enough material to start a large-scale poem on Paterson but realized that the project would take considerable time to complete. Moreover, his then-busy medical practice precluded his attempting such a project at that time. This did not stop Williams from taking some preliminary steps in the meanwhile. He wrote the poem "Paterson, Episode 17" in 1937 and would recycle it into the major work 10 years later. "Morning," written in 1938, was another poem intended for Paterson. In 1939, Williams sent James Laughlin at New Directions Publishing an 87-page sheaf of poems labeled "Detail and Parody for the Poem Paterson." This collection as such was not published. However, 15 of its "details," titled "For the Poem Patterson [spelling Williams]" appeared in the collection The Broken Span, which New Directions released in 1941. Addressing The Waste Land One reason Williams deliberated on Paterson was his longstanding concern about the poem The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, which with its overall tone of disillusionment had tapped into a much larger sense of cultural ennui that had arisen in the aftermath of World War I and become a touchstone for the Lost Generation. As Margaret Lloyd states in her critical reappraisal of Paterson, "many critics and poets indicate their poetical inclinations by aligning themselves specifically with T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams, and ... Paterson was, from its very conception, intended to be a 'detailed reply' (SL, 239) to the Eliot bias of modern poetry." To Williams, Eliot "had moved into a vacuum with his poem," in Mariani's words, and taken American poetry with it. Moreover, Eliot's use of conventional meter (though varied in places by speech rhythms) did not seem endemic to American speech and thus seemed outside the course that American poetry had seemed headed since the poetry of Walt Whitman. For American poetry (and by extension his own work) to progress, Williams argued, it needed to move away from foreign traditions and classic forms and essentially find its own way. Hart Crane, with whom Williams was in contact, had felt similarly about The Waste Land. However, Williams dismissed Crane's reaction to The Waste Land, his long poem The Bridge, as "a direct step backward to the bad poetry of any age but especially to that triumphant regression [French symbolism] which followed Whitman and imitates...the Frenchman [Mallarmé] and came to a head in