Between 1928 and 1930 William Carlos Williams wrote a series of short meditations on the topics of education, history, literature, and language, the fragments of which remained unpublished until 1974, when Ron Loewinsohn produced a critical edition of the extant manuscript under the title The Embodiment of Knowledge. One of the recurrent motifs in this posthumously published work is the use of Shakespeare as the creator of a naturalistic sensibility to which Williams felt himself an heir. Calling Shakespeare "My Grandfather," Williams explains that the Elizabethan playwright was to the classical Renaissance what America was to the Old World: a disruptive and eccentric presence, as yet uncharted in the literary cartographies of the ancients, and one whose freshness can be renewed and preserved by having the reader relate to it existentially rather than academically. At the same time, Williams admits that with Shakespeare a new concept of the classic comes into sight: "He wrote outside the scholarly tradition. One must make a choice in accepting his work: either he is a menace to the best in literature or the classic mode has been discovered by him in a fault."
    Since Williams’s articulation of the classic implicitly counters T.S. Eliot’s definition of it in "Andrew Marvell" (1921), and since it also anticipates certain aspects of Frank Kermode’s own equation, in The Classic (1975), of the Puritan colonization of North America with a post-classical translatio studii, I will discuss Williams’s ideas on Shakespeare within the context of the current debates on the canon, the classic, the curriculum, and the syllabus.