A shared relationship to the city of Paterson, New Jersey, provided common ground for Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams. A key figure in modernist poetry, Williams helped to modernize Ginsberg’s verse through both example and personal instruction. The influence is especially notable in the early work collected in Ginsberg’s Empty Mirror and in poems of the mid 1950s, leading up to Howl, published with an introduction by Williams. Eventually, the two diverged over the structure of the poetic line and the relation of the poet to popular culture. Nevertheless, both in his poetry and in his teaching, Ginsberg continued to honor Williams as one of his masters.