In the present edition it is possible, for the first time in a single volume, to read every poem that Williams ever sent to press—along with several from the published texts of his fictions, plays, and films, and a few others that have found their way into print since his death. The policy of the editors has been to reproduce the text of each of Williams’s published poems, always in the latest form in which he authorized them for publication. An exception to this rule is the case of posthumously published works, which are reproduced as they first appeared. Wherever possible we have attempted to eliminate line runovers that existed in earlier printings. Only a few of Williams’s published verses are absent from this book. The longest is a twenty-line passage that he quoted in an essay, “Survival Notes,” to illustrate the kind of doggeral he'd recited for tips while waiting tables in 1942 (Esquire, Sept. 1972, p. 134). Other slight, excluded context-bound pieces include a jingle and limerick from The Night of the Iguana; and scraps of rhyme and song from Moise and the World of Reason, Will Mr. Merriwether Return from Memphis?, The Remarkable Rooming-House of Mme. LeMonde, and Something Cloudy, Something Clear.
Besides reprinting the complete texts of In the Winter of Cities and Androgyne, Mon Amour in sections of their own, the editors have also devoted sections to the uncollected verse after 1939, including posthumously published poems; to verse that Williams published before 1939 as “Thomas Lanier Williams” (and variants of this name, as well as other pseudonyms besides “Tennessee”); to juvenile works that appeared in print during Williams’s childhood and adolescence, or that were published to illustrate accounts of this period written later by himself and others; and to the poems that were prominently featured in his fiction, plays and films, but were otherwise unpublished. Because the verse in this last category was sometimes incomplete in its published form (usually where a character interrupted his or her own, or another character’s recitation of a work), the editors have allowed themselves in such cases to make exceptions to their rule of collecting only published texts, and have supplemented the previously published verses of each incomplete poem with transcriptions from what they judge to be the latest extant finished typescript (so far as this can be ascertained with reasonable probability).
In the Tennessee Williams Papers at the Ransom Center there are folders and boxes full of drafts of poems by Williams that are unpublished, and in many instances unfinished. Even these thousands of pages account for only a fraction, if a significant fraction, of what he actually composed. It is not now the time, and indeed the time may never arrive, for assembling the entire body of Williams’s extant unpublished verse (in Texas and elsewhere) into a complete edition. Still, many individual unpublished poems are potentially of interest to the devotee and to the scholar, and will no doubt see print in years to come.