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.

Poetry

Williams is best known for his microscopic poem The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

The poem's intense focus on a single image, and its concision (the poem that would make his fame is a mere 21 syllables) evocative of haiku is considered a model example of the Imagist movement's style and principles, summarized by the Imagist motto which he coined: "no ideas but in things."

As a young man Williams stayed true to this motto and his early poems (most of which he compiled in half-prose half-verse pamphlet manifestos and published himself) are similarly laconic and impersonal. However, as he grew older Williams distanced himself from the Imagist ideas he had helped to establish with Ezra Pound and H.D., whom he ultimately rejected as being "too European." This came on the heel os a brief collaboration with Pound on T.S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land, which he derided as a baroque network of obscure verbiage that sounded profound, a trend which he saw as one of the consequences of the Imagist movement. Williams became a staunch advoccate of Americanist Modernism, a philosophy exemplified best by the words of Walt Whitman, that proud great American poet and a profound influence for Williams:

Endless unfolding of words of ages!

And mine a word of the modern, the word En-Masse.

It is a common mistake to percieve Williams' turn towards Americanism as a curmudgeonly rejection of tradition and the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a series of interviews conducted at the end of his life, he admitted that John Keats, the most European and hoity-toity of poets, had been one of his profoundest influences. Although Williams championed a rejection of abstractions in favor of regionalism and "poetry of the local", he simultaneously rejected libertine free verse and lamented that the "meter itself" of modern times "has been lost / and we suffer for it."

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, but which at the same tiem could retain and renew the structure and machinery of the poetic form. To do this, he invented towards the end of his life the variable foot, a system of measuring poetic lines in time with the rhythms of American speech. In truth Williams' expositions on this new system of meter make almost no sense (he insisted, for instance, that "The iamb is not the normal measure of American speech", even though many of his greatest lines, including "The iamb is not the normal measure of American speech" fall into iambic patterns.) However, regardless of it being academically unintelligible, Williams' "loose verses" (as he preferred to call poems written in variable feet) have an unmistakble speech-like quality, as if the words and phrases of everyday life somehow came together to form unmistakbly beautiful poems.

Finding beauty in the commonplace was the goal of Williams' poetry throughout his life, and while as a young man he wrote about common things, as he matured he came to write uncommon thoughts with common words. The ordinary, the local, becomes reinvigorated with the light of poetic imagination, a gesture summarized beautifully in this brief passage from "Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower":

And so, by chance,

how should it be otherwise?

from what came to me

in a subway train

I build a picture

of all men.

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

Credits

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