William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American writer and pediatrician, developed in his poetry a lucid, vital style that reproduced the characteristic rhythms of American speech.

William Carlos Williams's major work, Paterson (1946-1958, published entire 1963), a five-volume impressionistic poem, is an attempt to define the duties of the poet in the context of the American environment. Its appearance firmly established him as a major poet, and his work became greatly influential on the new generation of American poets.

Williams was born on Sept. 17, 1883, in Rutherford, N.J. He was educated in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his medical degree in 1906 from Pennsylvania, where he met poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. After interning for two years in New York hospitals and studying pediatrics at the University of Leipzig, Williams began practicing pediatrics in Rutherford in 1910. He continued his medical career for more than 40 years, writing in his spare time. That his profession allowed little time for study and writing probably accounts for both the unevenness of much of his verse and the naiveté of his poetic theory. He died in Rutherford on March 4, 1963.

Development of the Poet

The lifelong tension in Williams between a romantic poetic sensibility and a confused modernist poetic theory was largely the result of the conflict between the two major influences in his development: his loyalty to Ezra Pound and his devotion to his mother. Pound had actually launched him as a poet in 1912, when he arranged for publication of six poems in the English Poetry Review and wrote an encouraging and affectionate introduction to his friend's verse. Williams acknowledged the influence of Pound's teachings (which he never fully understood) in I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958). Here Williams wrote, "Before meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D." The Tempers (1913), Williams's first commercially published volume, was accepted by the publisher primarily through Pound's influence. Kora in Hell (1920) was partly inspired by a book Pound had left in Williams's house.

But if it was Pound who shaped Williams's ideas about poetry, it was his mother who shaped the man himself and the verse he actually created. As a result, he consistently uttered contradictory statements and often appeared to deny the poetry written out of his deepest self. If Pound represented "realism" and "science," authority and discipline, and the conscious will, Williams's mother stood for romance, freedom and impulse, and the unconscious springs of the creative miracle itself. A Spanish Jew, Williams's mother seemed out of place in industrial New Jersey. The feelings Williams held for her are evident in his statements in I Wanted to Write a Poem about her "ordeal" as a woman and a foreigner, about her interest in art, which became, as he says, his own, and about his feeling that she was a "mythical" figure, a heroic "poetic ideal."

The conflict between the influences of Pound and his mother affected Williams all his life and finally resolved itself into the artistic problem of how to write essentially "romantic" poetry while professing an antiromantic, behavioristic theory of poetics. The conflict came violently to the surface twice in Williams's career. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, published in 1922, should have been an occasion for rejoicing for Williams, as it was for Pound, because Eliot's masterpiece exemplified the characteristics Pound and Williams had been demanding of contemporary poetry.

Yet for Williams the poem was clearly a shattering experience. Eliot's poem seemed to him, reflecting on it years later in I Want to Write a Poem, a "great catastrophe to our letters," a work of genius which by its very brilliance seemed to make unnecessary his own groping experiments in developing a distinctively American poetry written in a native idiom. Overawed by the stylistic brilliance and the learning of Eliot's poem, yet profoundly unsympathetic to its description of modern culture as a "waste land," Williams felt defeated in his effort to create a new sort of poetry rooted in common experience in a specific locality, his "Paterson."

The second trauma involved the awarding of the Bollingen Prize to Pound's Pisan Cantos in 1948 while Pound was under indictment for treason for making broadcasts during World War II for the Italian Fascist dictator, Mussolini. Williams's inability to accept an appointment to the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress, because of a stroke, just at the time when Eliot and the other fellows of the Library were voting to grant the prize to Pound, and the resulting congressional controversy over the award, exacerbated Williams's difficulty in reconciling his sincere patriotism with his affection for Pound. His deferred appointment was attacked in Congress as a strengthening of the un-American Ezra Pound "clique" among the fellows; the attacks delayed Williams's recovery. As his wife later wrote, "Coming after the stroke, it was too much; it set him back tragically, kept him from poetry and communication with the world for years."

In many respects Williams's Autobiography (1951) was a form of therapy, for within it he was able to exorcise many of his frustrations and resentments. In the end, the shock and painful self-examination resulting from the affair had a salutary effect on his work; his chief poems after this period, Journey to Love (1955), "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," and Paterson, Book V (1958), are the most self-assured and fully achieved of his career. He was freed from an excessive dependence on Pound's example, and his mother's influence became increasingly dominant. He did not live to complete the book he planned about her, but his projected Paterson, Book VI clearly revealed the essentially romantic sensibility she had nurtured.

Although Williams thought of himself as a "realist," in reaction against what Pound had called the "messy, blurry, sentimentalistic" 19th century, he was actually a sort of modern Walt Whitman. Under Pound's tutelage he had denigrated Whitman, only to reverse himself later when postwar critics demonstrated that it was neither naive to approve Whitman nor unflattering to be said to resemble him. Williams never seemed to realize that Pound himself was much more indebted to Whitman than he ever cared to admit. Over a lifetime of contradictory writing and lecturing, Williams revealed little understanding of Leaves of Grass, and it is likely that he read it only superficially.

It was typical of Williams's critical innocence that in the 1940s and 1950s he vehemently continued to expound the modernist poetics first elaborated by Eliot and Pound a generation earlier, seemingly unaware that these theories had long since ceased to be revolutionary and were, in fact, the essence of the academic New Criticism he scorned. Unwittingly, Williams theoretically agreed with the very critics who slighted his work for its romanticism.

Williams's Works

As always, there was a tremendous gap between what Williams intended - "autotelic," "pure," aristocratic poetry exhibiting primarily metrical expertness - and what he actually wrote - Whitmanesque poetry celebrating the native and the local that affirmed the beauty and meaning of the commonplace in American democracy. Williams's best work, from Al Que Quiere (1917) on, was characterized by a tension between romantic feeling and the concern to confront the brute facts of reality.

"Gulls," one of the best early poems, suggests that the harshness of the gulls' cries makes a better hymn than those sung in the churches, which outrage "true music." "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital," which Williams intended as a pure imagist poem, actually concludes with the supposedly "neutral" poet affirming the possibility of life even in the urban wasteland. The workmen in "Fine Work with Pitch and Copper" are not machines that react to stimuli but artists who shape and create their own ends.

When Williams tried to "think out" poetry in terms of the imagist theory of the separation between the artist and his material, he usually failed. His greatest poems, such as the late "A Unison," resemble the opposite sort of response, wherein the poem itself becomes a religious celebration of the union of man, nature, life, and reality in the Emersonian tradition.

Wallace Stevens's insightful Preface to Williams's Collected Poems (1934), calling him a "romantic," deeply offended the poet, who thought he had been writing "scientific" poetry like his idol, Pound. Yet Stevens's assessment of the real sensibility behind the poetry was penetrating: "He is a romantic poet. This will horrify him. Yet the proof is everywhere." Williams indeed was so horrified that he never allowed the Preface to be reprinted. Randall Jarrell's Introduction to Williams's Selected Poems (1949) is still the best short criticism of the poet's work. Ignoring Williams's often contradictory and confused opinions, Jarrell pinpointed the central qualities of the best poems, "their generosity and sympathy, their moral and human attractiveness."

Williams's major work, Paterson, begins at the head-waters of the Passaic River in the past and proceeds downstream, both geographically and temporally. Book IV, which takes place at the currently polluted mouth of the river, seems an exception to the affirmations of most of his work. But he was committed to using the actual facts of his locale and refused to ignore the decline and degeneration, the blight and perversion that characterized contemporary Paterson. The measure of his commitment to affirmation, however, can be marked in Book V and the unfinished Book VI of the poem, in which he strove to correct Book IV's impression of despair and denial. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," one of his last and finest poems, seems completely free of irrelevant imagist baggage; in it Williams stands firm as a prophet of creative personality.

Other volumes of verse by Williams are Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Earlier Poems (1951), and Desert Music (1954). His essays include the reinterpretations of American history in In the American Grain (1925), Selected Essays (1954), and I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958). His plays include A Dream of Love (1948) and Many Loves (1950). He also wrote novels: A Voyage to Pagany (1928); a triology concerning an American immigrant family, White Mule (1937); In the Money (1940); and The Build-up (1952). The William Carlos Williams Reader (1966) brings together whole poems and excerpts from his most important prose.

Further Reading

Williams's Autobiography appeared in 1951, and his Selected Letters was published in 1957. See also John Malcolm Brinnin, William Carlos Williams (1963). Specialized studies include Linda Welsheimer Wagner, The Poems of William Carlos Williams (1964) and The Prose of William Carlos Williams (1970); J. Hillis Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966); and Joel Conarroe, William Carlos Williams' "Paterson": Language and Landscape (1970). There are sections on Williams in Randall jarrell, Poetry and the Age (1953), and Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968).

(1883-1963), poet, essayist, novelist, short-story writer, and physician. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania (M.D., 1906), Williams spent nearly all his professional life, both as an obstetrician-general practitioner and an insistently American experimental writer, in and around his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey. More single-mindedly than many of his contemporaries, Williams looked to American literary and political revolutions, and to a common language and even the pained screams of his patients, for topics and inspiration.

A player in the New York art and poetry worlds, he frequented Alfred Stieglitz's 291 and other galleries and was an intimate friend of painters Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, whose well-known Number 5, an abstract portrait of Williams, is based on the short poem "The Great Figure." He contributed poems, stories, and reviews to numerous American and international literary, artistic, and political magazines (Harriet Monroe's Poetry, the Social Crediters' New Democracy, Blast: A Journal of Proletarian Prose, his own Contact). Less a partisan than a proponent of radical individualism and of the new in any form, he was a self-proclaimed heir of Walt Whitman and adopted father of the Beats, who especially prized his further loosening of Whitman's "free verse" in colloquial language and the flexible line, "the variable foot."

His New York City literary and artistic associates and influences were variously related to European traditions and the French avant-garde (especially to dadaism and cubism), but he positioned these In the American Grain, the title of his 1925 polemical account of the "American" imagination manifest in such figures as Whitman, Poe, Lincoln, Columbus, a mythic Eric the Red, and the noble Montezuma. Prizing his mother's Puerto Rican heritage as well as her painting, Williams refused to limit his definition of "America" to English and Puritan colonization of the United States. The revisionary, heterogeneous, or "pagan" (as in Voyage to Pagany, his autobiographical, novelistic send-up) American tradition that informs his response to contemporary artistic rivals is best exemplified by the "Prologue" to Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), a creative commentary on epistolary attacks by Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., and others, and by Spring and All (1923), the mixed genre, proto-epic, analytic prose-poems. These works, available in Imaginations, the best anthology of Williams's early writings in various genres, summarize his critical and historical positions.

His most important representative work is Paterson, an experimental or parodic "epic"; published in separate books (1946-1958), it is a long poem composed of personal letters, newspaper articles, and otherwise "original" verse. "Paterson" names the poem's locale (Paterson, New Jersey), central character (the partially autobiographical Dr. Paterson), and oedipal theme (eponymously in the pun, pater-son) of a renewed American poetics. As intended, Paterson bears aesthetic and historical comparison with other modern epics or epochal works: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, Ezra Pound's The Cantos, H. D.'s Trilogy, and Wallace Stevens's Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.

Bibliography:

Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981); Joseph N. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams (1974).

Author:

Kathryne V. Lindberg

See also Literature.

William Carlos Williams

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Trained as a pediatrician, Williams practiced medicine for more than 40 years. At the same time, Williams wrote poems, essays, short stories, novels and plays. He said, "When they ask me... how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing." In 1963 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel (1962), a collection of his later poems.

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Williams, William Carlos, 1883-1963, American poet and physician, b. Rutherford, N.J., educated in Geneva, Switzerland, Univ. of Pennsylvania (M.D., 1906), and Univ. of Leipzig, where he studied pediatrics. He is regarded as one of the most important and original American poets of the 20th cent. Williams began his medical practice in 1910 in Rutherford and was a physician for more than 40 years. His early poetry shows the influences of the various poetic trends of the time-from metaphorical imagism in Poems (1909) and The Tempers (1913) to free-verse expressionism in Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell (1920), and Sour Grapes (1921). Williams observed American life closely, expressed anger at injustice, and recorded his impressions in a lucid, vital style. He developed a verse that is close to the idiom of speech, revealing a fidelity to ordinary things seen and heard. Later volumes of his poetry include Collected Poems (1934), Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Earlier Poems (1951), Journey to Love (1955), Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (1963; Pulitzer Prize), and a five-volume, impressionistic, philosophical poem, Paterson (1946-58), in which he uses the experience of life in an American city to voice his feelings on the duty of the poet. His essays include those in In the American Grain (1925), Selected Essays (1954), and Embodiment of Knowledge (1974). Among his other works are a collection of short stories, Make Light of It (1950); plays, including A Dream of Love (1948) and Many Loves (1950); and the novels A Voyage to Pagany (1928), a three-volume chronicle of an immigrant family in America, White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). His autobiography appeared in 1951 and his Selected Letters was published in 1957.

Bibliography

See biographies by R. Coles (1975) and P. Mariani (1981); studies by J. E. Breslin (1970), S. Tapscott (1984), S. Cushman (1985), and A. Fisher-Wirth (1989).

(1883-1963)

1913	The Tempers. Following a privately printed first verse collection, Poems (1909), Williams's first publication is a series of dramatic monologues showing the influence of his friend Ezra Pound.
1917	Al Que Quiere! Williams's third collection displays the more characteristic open, expressive forms of his mature work. It includes "The Young Housewife," one of his first major poems and one of the first significant achievements of the Imagist method.
1920	Kora in Hell. Williams's series of prose poems in which he attempts "to refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live" had first appeared serially in the Little Review in 1919 alongside installments of James Joyce's Ulysses. Although it proved an important work in Williams's development of a characteristic American diction and experimental forms, the work baffles the critics and even his friends: Ezra Pound calls it "incoherent," and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) complains that it is "un-serious." A second similar volume, Sour Grapes, would appear in 1921.
1923	Spring and All. Published in Paris, this is the poet's most important early collection, containing some of his finest works, including the title poem, "To Elsie," "At the Ballgame," and, perhaps his most famous short poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow." Despite his considerable achievement, Williams would not publish another collection for almost a decade.
1923	The Great American Novel. Published in Paris as part of Ezra Pound's series Inquest into the State of Contemporary English Prose, which also includes Ernest Hemingway's in our time, Williams's experimental prose work is, in the words of its creator, "about a little Ford falling in love with a truck. It is about an American writer's use of words."
1925	In the American Grain. In a series of impressionistic prose studies, Williams considers important figures in the development of America, such as Christopher Columbus, Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, to "find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify."
1928	A Voyage to Pagany. Williams's first novel is an autobiographical account of a small-town doctor's search for a better life in Europe, providing commentary on the European literary scene.
1932	The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories. Williams's first story collection is a series of objectively rendered commonplace episodes.
1934	Collected Poems, 1921-1931. Some of the poet's greatest works are collected in this edition issued by the Objectivist Press with a preface by Wallace Stevens, who calls his friend the "Diogenes of modern poetry."
1935	An Early Martyr, and Other Poems. Williams's collection includes one of his most anthologized poems, "The Yachts."
1936	Adam & Eve & The City. Besides the three title poems, the volume includes one of the poet's best lyrics of the period, "The Crimson Cyclamen."
1937	White Mule. The first novel of a trilogy concerns the adjustment of an immigrant family, based on the author's in-laws, to life in America. Subsequent volumes are In the Money (1940) and The Build-Up (1952).
1938	Life Along the Passaic River. Williams's second short story collection includes highly regarded works such as "The Use of Force," "The Girl with the Pimply Face," and "Jean Beicke."
1938	Complete Collected Poems, 1906-1938. New Directions brings out the "definitive edition" of the poet's work up to this point.
1940	In the Money. In the sequel to White Mule (1937), Williams continues the story of the Stecher family, particularly their two young daughters, as the former immigrants rise in prosperity and enter the American middle class. Williams would continue the story of their assimilation in The Build-Up (1952).
1941	The Broken Span. Williams's collection of imagist poems rooted in commonplace experience is the last book his publisher, New Directions, brings out before a five-year hiatus in publishing, due to drastic wartime paper shortages.
1944	The Wedge. Williams's most important volume since Complete Collected Poems (1938) shows both his imagist background and his characteristic method of suffusing ordinary life and details with emotional intensity.
1946	Paterson. Book one of the poet's magnum opus--Williams's Leaves of Grass--is an immense free-verse poetic sequence, incorporating historical documents, newspaper clippings, and personal letters, in order to capture Paterson, New Jersey, in its historical, personal, and mythic dimensions. Subsequent books would be published in 1948, 1949, 1951, and 1958, with a fragmentary sixth book appearing posthumously in 1963.
1950	Make Light of It. To his two previous story collections Williams adds new works, grouped as "Beer and Cold Cuts." His final collection, The Farmers' Daughters: The Collected Stories, would appear in 1961.
1951	Autobiography. Although filled with many factual mistakes, Williams's memoir is still an important reflection of his writing life.
1954	The Desert Music and Other Poems. In his first collection since his stroke in 1952, Williams shows a renewed celebration of humanity and the rediscovery of poetic inspiration. Williams also publishes his Selected Essays.
1955	Journey to Love. Williams's collection features one of his most important later poems, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," a long meditative love poem addressed to Williams's wife, which Auden calls "one of the most beautiful poems in the language."
1962	Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Williams's final collection of his later work, including "The Desert Music" and "Journey to Love," earn the Pulitzer Prize.

Quotes:

"It is at the edge of a petal that love waits."

"But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents."

"Empty pockets make empty heads."

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