William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine with a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician" but excelled at both.
Life and career
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son, Williams' father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. He received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He attended the Horace Mann School upon his return to New York City and after having passed a special examination, he was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906.[2][3] He published his first book, Poems, in 1909.

Williams married Florence Herman (1891–1976) in 1912, after his first proposal to her older sister was refused.[4] They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Shortly afterward, his second book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend, Ezra Pound whom he met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. 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 the Imagist movement through his friendships with Ezra Pound and H.D. (also known as Hilda Doolittle, another well-known poet whom he befriended while attending the University of Pennsylvania), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poet/friends.

In 1915 Williams also began to associate with a group of New York artists and writers known as "The Others."[5] Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and the artist Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Marcel Duchamp.

In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (like H.D., Pound, and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his most experimental books, Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Pound called the work "incoherent" and H.D. thought the book was "flippant."[6]

A few years later, Williams published one of his seminal books of poetry, Spring and All, which contained classic Williams poems like "By the road to the contagious hospital," "The Red Wheelbarrow," and "To Elsie." However, in 1922, the year before Williams published Spring and All, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land which became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williams' very different brand of poetic Modernism. In his Autobiography, Williams would later write, "I felt at once that [The Waste Land] had 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." And 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.[7]. Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English.[8]

In his modernist epic collage of place, Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, he tried to write his own Modernist 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 in Paterson).

In his later years, Williams took on the role of elder statesman and mentored and influenced younger poets. He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s, including the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School.[9]

One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jerseyite Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's important first book, Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

After Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1949 a series of strokes followed. Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine at his home in Rutherford.[10][11] He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.[12]

Poetry
The poet/critic Randall Jarrell said of his 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."[13]

Williams' major collections are Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and Paterson (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 already rejected the Imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 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.

Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter was 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' method of determining line breaks. Williams commented that the 'variable foot' was a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse.[14]

One of Williams' 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 the three, free-verse segments. A well-known example of the "triadic line [break]' can be found in Williams' love-poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.[15]

In a review of William Carlos Williams' biography, "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams, by Herbert Leibowitz, book critic Christopher Benfey wrote of Williams's poetry, "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."