William Carlos Williams

"Carlos Williams" redirects here. For the Liberian footballer, seeCarlos Williams (footballer).

William Carlos Williams
Portrait byMan Ray,1924
Born	(1883-09-17)September 17, 1883 Rutherford, New Jersey,U.S.
Died	March 4, 1963(1963-03-04)(aged 79) Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Writer physician
Education	University of Pennsylvania(MD)
Literary movement	Modernism Imagism
Notable works	Spring and All "This Is Just To Say" "The Red Wheelbarrow" Paterson Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
Spouse	Florence Herman ​ (m.1912)​

William Carlos Williams(September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician of Latin American descent closely associated withmodernismandimagism.HisSpring and All(1923) was written in the wake ofT. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land(1922). In his five-volume poemPaterson(1946-1958), he tookPaterson, New Jerseyas "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best known poems, "This Is Just To Say"and"The Red Wheelbarrow",are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem" The Great Figure "inspired the paintingI Saw the Figure 5 in GoldbyCharles Demuth.Williams won a posthumousPulitzer Prize for PoetryforPictures from Brueghel and Other Poems(1962).

Williams practiced bothpediatricsand general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known asSt. Mary's General Hospital,paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked".

Randall Jarrellwrote that Williams "feels, not just says, that the differences between men are less important than their similarities—that he and you and I, together, are the Little Men." Marc Hofstadter wrote that Williams "sought to express his democracy through his way of speaking. His point was to speak on an equal level with the reader and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his point of view." Per Hugh Fox, Williams saw "the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at and hand and revealing its wonder."

Life and career

Williams was born inRutherford, New Jersey,in 1883. His father, William George Williams, was born in England but raised from "a very young age" in theDominican Republic;his mother, Raquel Hélène Hoheb, fromMayagüez, Puerto Rico,was of French extraction.Incidentally, Williams's maternal grandmother was named Emily Dickinson, though he was no relation tothe poet of that name.

Scholars note that the Caribbean culture of the family home had an important influence on Williams. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "English was not his primary means of communication until he was a teenager. At home his mother and father—who were raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively—spoke Spanish with each other and to young William Carlos."While he wrote in English, "the poet's first language" was Spanish and his "consciousness and social orientation" were shaped by Caribbean customs; his life influenced "to a very important degree by a plural cultural foundation."

John KeatsandWalt Whitmanwere important early influences on Williams.Williams received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897 when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to theLycée Condorcetin Paris. He attended theHorace Mann Schoolupon his return to New York City and, having passed a special examination, was admitted in 1902 to themedical school of the University of Pennsylvania,from which he graduated in 1906.Upon leaving Penn, Williams did internships at bothFrench Hospitaland Child's Hospital in New York, then went toLeipzigfor advanced study of pediatrics.He published his first book,Poems,in 1909.

Williams married Florence ( "Flossie" ) Herman (1891–1976) in 1912 after he returned from Germany.They moved into a house on 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, where they resided for many years.Shortly afterward, his second book of poems,The Tempers,was published by a London press through the help of his friendEzra Pound,whom he had met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1914, Williams and his wife had their first son, William E. Williams, followed by their second son, Paul H. Williams, in 1917.William E. also became a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. His work has a great affinity with painting, in which he had a lifelong interest. In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in theImagistmovement through his friendships with Pound andH.D.(whom he had befriended during his medical studies at Penn), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his style changed to express his commitment to a modernist expression of his immediate environment. He was influenced by the "inarticulate poems" of his patients.

In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (including H.D., Pound andWallace Stevens) when he published one of his more experimental booksKora in Hell: Improvisations.Pound called the work "incoherent" and H.D. thought the book was "flippant".TheDadaartist and poetBaroness Elsacriticized Williams's sexual and artistic politics in her experimental prose poem review titled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'", published inThe Little Reviewin March 1921.Williams had an affair with the Baroness, and published three poems inContact,describing the forty-year-old as "an old lady" with "broken teeth [and] syphilis".

In 1923, Williams publishedSpring and All,one of his seminal books of poetry, which contained the classics "By the road to the contagious hospital", "The Red Wheelbarrow"and" To Elsie ". However, in 1922, the publication ofT. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Landhad become a literary sensation that overshadowed Williams's very different brand of poeticmodernism.In hisAutobiography,Williams later wrote of "the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of T. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land."He said,

I felt at once thatThe Waste Landhad set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.

Although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliot's highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature.Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English.

During the 1930s, Williams began working on an opera. TitledThe First President,it was focused onGeorge Washingtonand his influence on the history of the United States of America and was intended to "galvanize us into a realization of what we are today."

—Say it, no ideas but in things—
nothing but the blank faces of the houses
and cylindrical trees
bent, forked by preconception and accident—
split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—
secret—into the body of the light!

fromPaterson: Book I

InPaterson(published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence ofPaterson, New Jersey,Williams wrote his own modern epic poem, focusing on "the local" on a wider scale than he had previously attempted. He also examined the role of the poet in American society and famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and repeated again and again inPaterson).

In his later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had a significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s, including theBeat movement,theSan Francisco Renaissance,theBlack Mountain school,and theNew York School.

One of Williams's more dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jersey poetAllen Ginsberg.Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters inPaterson,stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's first book,Howl and Other Poemsin 1956.

Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, and after 1949, a series of strokes. Severe depression after one such stroke caused him to be confined to Hillside Hospital, New York, for four months in 1953. He died on March 4, 1963, at age 79 at his home in Rutherford.He was buried in Hillside Cemetery inLyndhurst, New Jersey.

Poetry

A selection of William Carlos Williams poetry on a plaque in New York City

The poet and criticRandall Jarrellstated of Williams's poetry,

William Carlos Williams is as magically observant and mimetic as a good novelist. He reproduces the details of what he sees with surprising freshness, clarity, and economy; and he sees just as extraordinarily, sometimes, the forms of this earth, the spirit moving behind the letters. His quick transparent lines have the nervous and contracted strength, move as jerkily and intently as a bird.

R. P. Blackmursaid of Williams's poetry, "the Imagism of 1912, self-transcended."A contemporary,Harriet Monroe,stated "to assert his freedoms he must play the devil, showing himself rioting in purple and turquoise pools of excess."

Williams's major collections areSpring and All(1923),The Desert Music and Other Poems(1954),Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems(1962), andPaterson(1963, repr. 1992). His most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow",an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also"This Is Just to Say"). However, Williams, like his peer and friend Ezra Pound, had rejected the Imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part ofSpring and Allin 1923.

Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. “No one believes that poetry can exist in his own life,” Williams said. “The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.”

In 1920, Williams turned his attentions toContact,a periodical launched by Williams and fellow writerRobert McAlmon:"The two editors sought American cultural renewal in the local condition in clear opposition to the internationalists—Pound,The Little Review,and the Baroness. "Yvor Winters,the poet/critic, judged that Williams's verse bears a certain resemblance to the bestlyricpoets of the 13th century.

Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the "variable foot" which Williams never clearly defined, although the concept vaguely referred to Williams's method of determining line breaks.The Paris Reviewcalled it "a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse."

One of Williams's aims, in experimenting with his "variable foot", was to show the American (opposed to European) rhythm that he claimed was present in everyday American language. Stylistically, Williams also worked with variations on a line-break pattern that he labeled "triadic-line poetry"in which he broke a long line into three free-verse segments. A well-known example of the" triadic line [break] "can be found in Williams's love-poem"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower."

In a review of Herbert Leibowitz's biography of Williams, book critic Christopher Benfey wrote:

Early and late, Williams held the conviction that poetry was, in his friend Kenneth Burke's phrase, "equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life." The American ground was wild and new, a place where a blooming foreigner needed all the help he could get. Poems were as essential to a full life as physical health or the love of men and women.

Williams and the painters

I saw the figure 5 in gold.
Charles Demuth,1928.

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

William Carlos Williams 1920.

Williams's mother had trained as a painter in Paris and passed on her enthusiasm to her son, who also painted in his early years.A painting by him now hangs in Yale University'sBeinecke Libraryand as late as 1962 he was still remembering in an interview that "I'd like to have been a painter, and it would have given me at least as great a satisfaction as being a poet."For most of his life Williams wrote art criticism and introductions to exhibitions by his friends.

In 1915, Williams began to associate with the New York group of artists and writers known as"The Others."Founded by the poetAlfred Kreymborgand the artistMan Ray,they includedWalter Conrad Arensberg,Wallace Stevens,Mina Loy,Marianne Moore,Orrick Glenday JohnsandMarcel Duchamp.Interlocking with them were the US artists who met at Arensburg's studio, includingMarsden Hartley,Joseph Stella,Charles DemuthandCharles Sheeler,with whom Williams developed close friendships.

Although he championed the new way of seeing and representation pioneered by the Europeanavant-garde,Williams and his artistic friends wished to get away from what they saw as a purely derivative style. As one result, he startedContactmagazine with Hartley in 1920 in order to create an outlet for works showcasing the belief that creative work should derive from the artist's direct experience and sense of place and reject traditional notions of how this should be done.

Precisionismemerged in response to such thinking. In her study of the influence of painting on Williams, Ruth Grogan devoted several paragraphs to the dependency of some of his poems on the paintings of Charles Sheeler in this style, singling out in particular the description of a power house in Williams's "Classic Scene".But the close relationship with Charles Demuth was more overt. Williams's poem "The Pot of Flowers" (1923) references Demuth's painting "Tuberoses" (1922), which he owned. On his side, Demuth created his "I saw the figure 5 in gold" (1928) as a homage to Williams's poem "The Great Figure" (1921). Williams's collectionSpring and All(1923) was dedicated to the artist and, after his early death, he dedicated the long poem "The Crimson Cyclamen." (1936) to Demuth's memory.

Later collaborations with artists include the two poem/ two drawing volume that he shared withWilliam Zorachin 1937and his poem "Jersey Lyric", written in response to Henry Niese's 1960 painting of the same title:

View of winter trees
before
one tree

in the foreground
where
by fresh-fallen

snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
for the fire

Throughout his career, Williams thought of his approach to poetry as a painterly deployment of words, saying explicitly in an interview, "I've attempted to fuse the poetry and painting, to make it the same thing….A design in the poem and a design in the picture should make them more or less the same thing."However, in the case of his references to much earlier painters, culminating inPictures from Brueghel(1962), his approach was more commentarial. Of this late phase of his work it has been claimed that "Williams saw these artists solving, in their own ways, the same problems that concerned him,"but his engagement with them was at a distance.

Legacy, awards and honors

This Is Just To Say
(wall poem in The Hague)

The U.S.National Book Awardwas reestablished in 1950 with awards by the book industry to authors of books published in 1949 in three categories. Williams won the firstNational Book Award for Poetry,recognizing both the third volume ofPatersonandSelected Poems.

In 1952, Williams was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, but was barred from serving out his term due to unfounded accusations of Williams's membership in a communist organization. Williams retained legal counsel to refute the charges but was never allowed to respond to his critics and never received an apology from the Library of Congress.The next year, however, he received theBollingen Prizealong withArchibald MacLeish.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded thePulitzer PrizeforPictures from Brueghel and Other Poems(1962) and the gold medal for Poetry of theNational Institute of Arts and Letters.The Poetry Society of America presents theWilliam Carlos Williams Awardannually for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams's housein Rutherford was added to theNational Register of Historic Placesin 1973.He was inducted into theNew Jersey Hall of Famein 2009.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

• Poems(1909)
• The Tempers(1913)
• Al Que Quiere!(1917)
• Sour Grapes(1921)
• Spring and All(1923)
• Go Go(1923)
• 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)
• PatersonBook 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)
• The Red Wheelbarrow(1923)

Books, prose

• Kora in Hell: Improvisations(1920) – Prose-poem improvisations.
• The Great American Novel(1923) – A novel.
• Spring and All(1923) – A hybrid of prose and verse.
• In the American Grain(1925), 1967, repr. New Directions 2004 – Prose on historical figures and events.
• A Voyage to Pagany(1928) – An autobiographical travelogue in the form of a novel.
• Novelette and Other Prose(1932)
• The Knife of the Times and Other Stories(1932)
• White Mule(1937) – A novel.
• Life Along the Passaic River(1938) – Short stories.
• In the Money(1940) – Sequel toWhite Mule.
• Make Light of It: Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams(1950)
• Autobiography(1951) W. W. Norton & Co. (1 February 1967)
• The Build-Up(1952) – Completes the "Stecher trilogy" begun withWhite Mule.
• 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)
• The Farmers' Daughters: The Collected Short Stories of William Carlos Williams(1961)
• Imaginations(1970) – A collection of five previously published early works.
• The Embodiment of Knowledge(1974) – Philosophical and critical notes and essays.
• Interviews With William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead"(1976)
• A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists(1978)
• The Doctor Stories:Compiled byRobert Coles(1984)
• Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams(1996)
• The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams(1996)
• The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams(1998)
• William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection(1998)
• The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke(2004)

Drama

• Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams(1962)

Translations

• Last Nights of Paris(1929) – A novel translated from the French of Philippe Soupault.
• By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916–1959(2011) – Poetry of Spanish and Latin American authors.
• The Dog and the Fever(2018) – A novella translated from the Spanish of Pedro Espinosa.

See also

• List of Puerto Rican writers
• William Carlos Williams Center for the Performing Arts
• Epic poetry
• Latino poetry
• Puerto Rican poetry

Further reading

• Bremen, Brian A. (1993).William Carlos Williams and the diagnostics of culture.New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gammel, Irene. “The Poetic Feud of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and the Baroness”.Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 262-285
• Leibowitz, Herbert.“Something Urgent I Have to Say to You”: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 496 pages.

External links

Profiles

• Profile at PoetryFoundation.org
• Profile at the Poetry Archive with poems written and audio
• Profile atModern American Poetry Society
• William Carlos Williams: Profile and Poems at Poets.org
• Stanley Koehler (Summer–Fall 1964)."William Carlos Williams, The Art of Poetry No. 6".The Paris Review.Summer-Fall 1964 (32).
• National Book Foundation Poetry Blog
• William Carlos WilliamsatBookBrainz

Archive and works

• Works by William Carlos Williams in eBook formatStandard Ebooks
• Works by William Carlos WilliamsatProject Gutenberg
• Works by William Carlos WilliamsatFaded Page(Canada)
• Works by or about William Carlos WilliamsatInternet Archive
• Works by William Carlos WilliamsatLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)
• William Carlos Williams PapersYale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Listen to William Carlos Williams read his poems
• Archiveat the University of Delaware Library Special Collections Department.
• Archiveat SUNY Buffalo Libraries.
• The William Carlos Williams Review.Journal.
• William Carlos Williams Collectionat theHarry Ransom Center,University of Texas at Austin.
• William Carlos Williams Research Collection,Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
• William Carlos Williams Manuscripts and Correspondenceat Dartmouth College Library
• Authors and Poets collectionatUniversity of Maryland Libraries