William Carlos Williams

Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with Modernism.

Life

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a town near the city of Paterson. His father was an English immigrant, and his mother was born in Puerto Rico. He attended public school in Rutherford, New Jersey until 1897, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann High School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams befriended Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth. These friendships supported his growing passion for poetry. He received his M.D. in 1906 and spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad (e.g., at the Univ. of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics). He returned to Rutherford in 1910 and began his medical practice, which lasted until 1951. Ironically, most of his patients knew little if anything of his writings and instead they viewed him as an old-fashioned doctor who helped deliver over 2,000 of their children into the world.

In 1912 he married his fiancée Florence (Flossie, "the floss of his life") Herman, who had been his co-valedictorian at Horace Mann. The newlyweds moved into a house at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford. Shortly afterwards, his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published. The Williamses spent most of the rest of their lives in Rutherford, New Jersey, although the couple did travel occasionally. One such trip was to Europe in 1924. There Williams spent time with fellow writers such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Williams returned home alone that year, while his wife and sons stayed in Europe so that the boys could have a year abroad as Williams and his brother had had in their youth. Much later in his career, Williams traveled the United States to give poetry readings and lectures. Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends - writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Williams aligned himself with liberal Democratic and left wing issues. In 1949 he published a booklet/poem The Pink Church that was about the human body but was misunderstood as being pro-communist. This supposed pro-communism led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, a fact that led to him being treated for clinical depression. Williams had a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1951 a series of strokes followed. William Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine. Two days later, a British publisher finally announced that he was going to print his poems – one of fate’s ironies, since Williams had always protested the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the USA.

Career

During his time in New York City (about 1906-1910), Williams became friends with the avant-garde modern artists Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Around this time he got to know the Dadaist movement. That is why many of his earlier poems are influenced by Dadaist and Surrealist principles. In general, he found modern art very inspiring. Williams even was involved in the "Armory Show" in 1913 (read the link).

While Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T.S. Eliot's (see The Waste Land) frequent use of allusions to foreign languages, religion, history or art, Williams drew his themes from what he called "the local." He coined the expression "No ideas but in things", his famous summation of his poetic method. What he meant is that poets should leave traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions aside and try to see the world through the eyes of an ordinary person. Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read", to use a phrase of Marianne Moore, another doubter of poetic meter. He was concerned with writing poetry in a recognizably American idiom.

In May 1963, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His major works are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), Paterson (1963, repr. 1992), and Imaginations (1970). The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit, or university press.

Poetry

Williams is best known for his poem The Red Wheelbarrow, which is considered the model example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also This Is Just To Say). He also coined the Imagist motto "no ideas but in things." However, Williams did not personally subscribe to Imagist ideas, which were more a product of Ezra Pound and H.D.. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, which rejected European influences in poetry in favor of regional dialogues and influences. In particular, his call for more regionalism in American literature came on the heels of his brief collaboration with Ezra Pound in editing an early draft of T.S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot's poem exemplified what Williams disliked about European influences on American poetics.

Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He then came up with the concept of the variable foot evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from the first person perspective as a part of the day in the life as a physician. The variable foot is rooted within the multi-faceted American Idiom. This discovery was a part of his keen observation of how radio and newspaper influenced how people communicated and represents the "machine of words" (as he decribed a poem on one occasion) just as the mechanistic motions of a city can become a consciousness. Williams didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems. His correspondence with Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth:

"Asteres men amphi kalan selannan

aps' apukpuptoisi faenon eithos

&oppota plithoisa malista lampsi

gan epi paisan"

"The stars about the beautiful moon again hide their radiant shapes, when she is full and shines at her brightest on all the earth" Sappho.

This is to be contrasted with a poem from "Pictures from Brueghel" titled Shadows:

"Shadows cast by the street light

under the stars,

the head is tilted back,

the long shadow of the legs

presumes a world taken for granted

on which the cricket trills"

The breaks in the poem search out a natural pause spoken in the American idiom, that is also reflective of rhythms found within jazz sounds that also touch upon Sapphic harmony. Williams never stopped searching for the perfect line. He experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the “triadic” or “stepped line’’, a long line which is divided into three segments. This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie". Here again one of Williams aims is to show the truly American (i.e. opposed to European traditions) rhythm which is unnoticed but present in everyday American language.

Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (1909)
The Tempers (1913)
Al Que Quiere (1917)
Kora in Hell. Improvisations (1920, repr. 1973)
Sour Grapes (1921)
Go Go (1923)
Spring and All (1923; repr. 1970)
The Cod Head (1932)
Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (1934)
An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)
Adam & Eve & The City (1936)
The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938 (1938)
The Broken Span (1941)
The Wedge (1944)
Paterson (Book I, 1946; Book II, 1948; Book III, 1949; Book IV, 1951; Book V, 1958)
Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia (1948)
The Collected Later Poems (1950; rev. ed.1963)
Collected Earlier Poems (1951; rev. ed., 1966)
The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954)
Journey to Love (1955)
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)
Paterson (Books I-V in one volume, 1963)
Imaginations (1970)
Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1909-1939 (1988)
Collected Poems: Volume 2, 1939-1962 (1989)
Early Poems (1997)

Prose

Kora in Hell (1920)
The Great American Novel (1923)
In the American Grain (1925, 1967, repr. New Directions 2004)
Novelette and Other Prose (1932)
Autobiography (1951; 1967)
Selected Essays (1954)
The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957)
I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958)
Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (1959)
Imaginations (1970)
The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974)
Interviews With William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead" (1976)
A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists (1978)
Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996)
The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)
William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (1998)
A Voyage to Pagany (1928; repr. 1970)
The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories (1932; repr. 1974)
White Mule (1937; repr. 1967)
Life along the Passaic River (1938)
In the Money (1940; repr. 1967)
Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
The Build-Up (1952)
The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961)
The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (1996)

Drama

Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1961)

External links

Photo Links

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