Williams positions himself in a long line of American and English language poets writing in blank verse and free verse. Walt Whitman, often touted as the father of free verse in the US, no doubt had a major influence on Williams’s poetic style and subject matter. Whitman freed his poetics from many of the traditions of his day, including the adherence to form and meter. He embraced open forms of poetry that included long, sprawling lines and themes highlighting both inner and outer struggles—an openness rooted in the optimism Whitman held for a burgeoning America. Whitman also found meaning in the quotidian, so that a leaf of grass becomes an entire poetic/philosophic investigation on time, love, tradition versus independence, and what it means to be human. Whitman, however, sings of the self, a self that looks outward toward some hopefully transformative destiny, and his transcendentalism is such that humankind and nature are not as antagonist toward one another (at least not always) as the relationship between humankind and nature in “Love Poem with Toast.”

Where Whitman might sound a barbaric yawp at the possibilities that destiny (and manifest destiny) might bring about, Williams’s “Love Poem with Toast” underscores just how much fate acts without any thought toward humankind’s whims.