T.S. Eliot excellently." Williams also studied The Cantos by Ezra Pound, the first 30 parts of which appeared in 1931. While Williams noted that Pound, in Mariani's words, "had managed to lift the language to new heights," he had also "deformed the natural order of speech at times...while somehow saving the excellences and even the forms of old." Developing form and method Williams, according to Mariani, concluded that tackling Paterson meant "to find a way beyond Eliot's poetic, and beyond Pound's, as well...in sculpting the words themselves, words with hard, concrete, denotative jagged edges." At the same time, the New Jersey dialect the poet wanted to set into verse could sound, as biographer Paul Mariani phrases it, "unrelievedly flat." In a note that accompanied the "Detail and Parody" manuscript he sent to New Directions, Williams told Laughlin and his associate Jim Higgins, "They are not, in some ways, like anything I have written before but rather plainer, simpler, more crudely cut...I too have to escape from my own modes." The formal solution eluded Williams into the early 1940s. In December 1943, he wrote Laughlin, "I write and destroy, write and destroy. [Paterson is] all shaped up on outline and intent, the body of the thinking is finished but the technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable to date." Finding a form of American vernacular that would facilitate poetic expression, which approximated speech rhythms but avoided the regularity of their patterns as both Joyce and Walt Whitman had done, proved a long trial-and-error process. This period proved doubly frustrating as Williams became impatient with his progress; he wanted to "really go to work on the ground and dig up a Paterson that would be a true Inferno." Williams also studied Pound's Cantos for clues on how to structure the large work he had in mind. Muriel Rukeyser's US1 also 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