William Carlos Williams

Source

• Born: 17 September 1883
• Birthplace: Rutherford, New Jersey
• Died: 4 March 1963
• Best Known As: Author of the poetic epic Paterson

William Carlos Williams was a local doctor in New Jersey throughout his life while also becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Williams was considered a groundbreaker: he wrote poems about the everyday lives of working people, an unusual notion for the time, and often tried unusual meters and styles. In later years these traits endeared him to Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg. Williams also wrote plays, novels, and essays. At the same time, he worked as a general physician in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey, for four decades. He published his Autobiography of William Carlos Williams in 1951, the year a series of strokes forced him to retire from medicine. He was given a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his 1962 collection Pictures from Brueghel, and other Poems.

Williams's mother was born in Puerto Rico, which helps account for his slightly Latin-sounding name... Williams earned his medical degree in 1906 from the University of Pennsylvania; while in school there he became friends with future poet Ezra Pound... He married the former Florence Herman in 1912. They had two sons: William (b. 1914) and Eric (b. 1916).

For more information on William Carlos Williams, visit Britannica.com.

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.

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."

William Carlos Williams
Born	September 17, 1883(1883-09-17) Rutherford, New Jersey, USA
Died	March 4, 1963 (aged 79) Rutherford, New Jersey, USA
Occupation	Writer, Doctor
Nationality	United States
Literary movement	Modernism, imagism

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), also known as WCW, was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin; but during his long lifetime, Williams excelled at both.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Career 1.2.1 Poetry 1.2.2 Politics 1.3 Personal life 2 Bibliography 2.1 Poetry 2.2 Prose 2.3 Drama 3 Notes 4 See also 5 External links

Biography

Early years

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson.^[1] His father, William George Williams was an English immigrant, and his mother, Raquel Hélène (Elena) Hoheb was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He attended a public school in Rutherford until 1896, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams became friends with Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (best known as H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth. These friendships influenced his growth and 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 University of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics). His famous poem, "Between Walls" was published then:

the back wings of the

hospital where nothing

will grow lie cinders

In which shine the broken

pieces of a green bottle

He returned to Rutherford in 1910 and began his medical practice, which lasted until 1951. Most of his patients knew little if anything of his writings; instead they viewed him as a doctor who helped deliver their children into the world. It was estimated that Williams delivered 2,000 babies in the Rutherford area between 1910 and 1952. ^[2] Today, Rutherford is home to a theater, "The Williams Center," named after the poet.

Career

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, 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. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

During the First World War, when a number of European artists established themselves in New York City, Williams became friends with members of the avant-garde such as Man Ray, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. In 1915 Williams began to be associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as "The Others." Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and by Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Duchamp. Through these involvements Williams got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America.

Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land. Williams preferred to draw his themes from what he called "the local." 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 examined the role of the poet in American society. Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his 1927 poem "Patterson," the forerunner to the book-length work). He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is. Marianne Moore, another skeptic of traditional poetic forms, wrote Williams had used "plain American which cats and dogs can read," with distinctly American idioms.

One of his most notable contributions to American literature was his willingness to be a mentor for younger poets. Though Pound and Eliot may have been more lauded in their time, a number of important poets in the generations that followed were either personally tutored by Williams or pointed to Williams as a major influence. He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s: poets of the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. He personally mentored Charles Olson, who was instrumental in developing the poetry of the Black Mountain College and subsequently influenced many other poets. Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, two other poets associated with Black Mountain, studied under Williams. Williams was friends with Kenneth Rexroth, the founder of the San Francisco Renaissance. A lecture Williams gave at Reed College was formative in inspiring three other important members of that Renaissance: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jerseyite Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg claimed that Williams essentially freed his poetic voice. 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 introductions to two of Ginsberg's books, including Howl. Williams sponsored unknown poets such as H.H. Lewis, a radical Missouri Communist poet, who he believed wrote in the voice of the people. Though Williams consistently loved the poetry of those he mentored, he did not always like the results of his influence on other poets (the perceived formlessness, for example, of other Beat Generation poets). Williams believed more in the interplay of form and expression.

Poetry

Williams' most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow", considered an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also "This Is Just To Say"). However, Williams, like his associate Ezra Pound, had long ago rejected the imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. Williams is more 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 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 made out of words" (as he described a poem in the introduction to his book, The Wedge) 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 also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth:

"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 Journey To Love 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 experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the "stepped triadic line", a long line which is divided into three segments. This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie" and "The Ivy Crown." 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. Stylistically, Williams worked with variations on free-form styles, notably developing and utilising the triadic line as in his lengthy love-poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower^[3].

Politics

Modern liberals portray Williams as aligned with liberal democratic issues; however, as his publications in more politically radical journals^[4] like Blast and New Masses suggest, his political commitments were further to the left than the term "liberal" indicates. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism, and in 1935 published "The Yachts", a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution. The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race". Furthermore, in the introduction to his 1944 book of poems "The Wedge", he writes of socialism as an inevitable future development and as a necessity for true art to develop. In 1949, he published a booklet/bar "The Pink Church" that was about the human body but was understood, in the context of McCarthyism, as being dangerously pro-communist. The anti-communist movement led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, an event that contributed to his being treated for clinical depression. As is demonstrated in an unpublished article for Blast, Williams believed artists should resist producing propaganda and be "devoted to writing (first and last)." However, in the same article Williams claims that art can also be "in the service of the proletariat".^[5]

Personal life

Williams married Florence Herman (1891-1976) in 1912.^[6] They moved into a house in Rutherford which was their home for many years. Shortly afterwards, his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published. On a trip to Europe in 1924, Williams spent time with writers Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Flossie and Williams's sons stayed behind in Europe to experience living abroad for a year as Williams and his brother had in their youth.

After Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1949 a series of strokes followed. He also underwent treatment for clinical depression in a psychiatric hospital during 1953.^[7] Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey.^[8][9] 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 against the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the United States. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.^[10]

In May 1963 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize 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.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.^[11]

Bibliography

Poetry

• 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)
• 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)

Quotes

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 to White Mule.
• Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
• Autobiography (1951)
• The Build-Up (1952) - Completes the "Stecher trilogy" begun with White 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: Collected Stories (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)
• 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)

Drama

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

Notes

1. ^ American Poets, Academy of. poets.org. Academy of American Poets. 13 May 2008 <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/119>.
2. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 193. ISBN 0195031865
3. ^ Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, ISBN 9781579582401
4. ^ . Educating English. 13 May 2008 William Carlos Williams Memorial
5. ^ Williams, William Carlos (1978). A Recognizable Image: William Carlos William on Art and Artists. W W Norton & Company. ISBN 0811207048. 
6. ^ "Mrs. William Carlos Williams.". The New York Times. May 20, 1976. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0615FE3D5B167493C2AB178ED85F428785F9. Retrieved 2008-04-20. 
7. ^ Fisher-Wirth, Ann. "Williams's "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"". Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/asphodel.html. 
8. ^ "Poet Williams Dies of Stroke. Works in 40 Volumes Likened to Chekhov.". The New York Times]]. March 5, 1963. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/access/154181472.html?dids=154181472:154181472&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=MAR+05%2C+1963&author=By+Phil+Casey+Staff+Reporter&pub=The+Washington+Post&desc=Poet+Williams+Dies+of+Stroke&pqatl=google. Retrieved 2008-08-07. 
9. ^ "William Carlos Williams Dies. Physician Long a Leading Poet. Won Many Literary Honors Over Half a Century. Was 79 Years Old. Combined Two Professions. Won Literary Awards.". The New York Times. March 5, 1963. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50B12FA3C541A7B93C7A91788D85F478685F9. Retrieved 2008-04-11. 
10. ^ "Sometimes the Grave Is a Fine and Public Place". The New York Times. March 28, 2004. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFD71230F93BA15750C0A9629C8B63. Retrieved 2007-08-21. 
11. ^ New Jersey to Bon Jovi: You Give Us a Good Name Yahoo News, February 2, 2009

See also

William Carlos Williams Center for the Performing Arts, performing art center named after Williams located in his hometown of Rutherford.

External links

Literature portal

Wikisource has original works written by or about: William Carlos Williams

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: William Carlos Williams

• Poems by William Carlos Williams at PoetryFoundation.org
• Yale College Lecture on William Carlos Williams audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
• William Carlos Williams Papers at Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• The William Carlos Williams Collection at the University of Delaware Library Special Collections Department.
• William Carlos Williams Collection at SUNY Buffalo Libraries.
• A collection of poems in the public domain.
• Works by or about William Carlos Williams in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• The William Carlos Williams Review.
• Chronology of Williams' life.
• A video clip of The Great Figure.
• WCW reads To Elsie.
• William Carlos Williams Center for the Performing Arts in Rutherford, New Jersey.

v • d • e Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress Joseph Auslander (1937) · Allen Tate (1943) · Robert Penn Warren (1944) · Louise Bogan (1945) · Karl Shapiro (1946) · Robert Lowell (1947) · Léonie Adams (1948) · Elizabeth Bishop (1949) · Conrad Aiken (1950) · William Carlos Williams (1952) · Randall Jarrell (1956) · Robert Frost (1958) · Richard Eberhart (1959) · Louis Untermeyer (1961) · Howard Nemerov (1963) · Reed Whittemore (1964) · Stephen Spender (1965) · James Dickey (1966) · William Jay Smith (1968) · William Stafford (1970) · Josephine Jacobsen (1971) · Daniel Hoffman (1973) · Stanley Kunitz (1974) · Robert Hayden (1976) · William Meredith (1978) · Maxine Kumin (1981) · Anthony Hecht (1982) · Reed Whittemore (1984) · Robert Fitzgerald (1984) · Gwendolyn Brooks (1985) · Robert Penn Warren (1986) · Richard Wilbur (1987) · Howard Nemerov (1988) · Mark Strand (1990) · Joseph Brodsky (1991) · Mona Van Duyn (1992) · Rita Dove (1993) · Robert Hass (1995) · Robert Pinsky (1997) · Rita Dove / Louise Glück / W. S. Merwin (1999) · Stanley Kunitz (2000) · Billy Collins (2001) · Louise Glück (2003) · Ted Kooser (2004) · Donald Hall (2006) · Charles Simic (2007) · Kay Ryan (2008)  · Kay Ryan (2009)

Persondata
NAME	Williams, William Carlos
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American poet and physician
DATE OF BIRTH	1883-9-17
PLACE OF BIRTH	Rutherford, New Jersey, United States
DATE OF DEATH	1963-3-4
PLACE OF DEATH	Columbia, Kentucky

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