William Carlos Williams

 



 

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet, playwright, novelist and essayist, experienced literary success relatively late in life. From a sensibility rooted in ethereal Elizabethan convention, Williams's work evolved towards an earthy American sensibility -- groundbreaking both in subject matter and in form -- that is saturated with the country's speech and its rhythms. He drew his life in the United States in terse images and presented these images unapologetically. His purpose was not to point to a moral or teach a lesson; rather, he wanted his readers to see through his eyes the beauty of the real. The mature Williams sought to jolt his readers out of their yearnings for dreamy tranquility and place them in direct contact with the literal, tangible world. This apparent contradiction with the academic classicism of those other beacons of modernism, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , delayed recognition of Williams's achievement even in the nation about which he wrote so ardently. However, by the end of his career, Williams had emerged as one of the great forces in twentieth-century American verse. 

William Carlos Williams was born on 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father, William George Williams, was of English ancestry, and his mother, Raquel Helene Hoheb, was of French, Spanish and Jewish extraction. Williams and his younger brother, Edward, attended public schools in their hometown until Williams was fourteen. The family then moved for two years to Europe, where Williams attended the Château de Lancy near Geneva and later the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Upon the family's return to the United States, he was sent to the prestigious Horace Mann High School in New York City. 

Largely influenced by the wishes of his parents, Williams decided to pursue a career in medicine, and after graduating from high school he took entrance examinations and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia. This career was accelerated by a peculiarity of his era: at the time it was not necessary to have gone to an undergraduate institution before applying. 

In Philadelphia Williams's interest in poetry led him into acquaintance with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle ( H.D. ) as well as the painter Charles Demuth, all of whom became his lifelong friends. It was here that the confines of a life raised in Rutherford began to fall away in earnest. In his autobiography, Williams reminisces that his newfound companions exhibited 'a provocative indifference to rule and order that I liked'. 

Williams finished medical school in 1906, then interned at the old French Hospital in New York City and later at the Nursery and Child's Hospital in the Hell's Kitchen district of the city. His first book, Poems , appeared in 1909, but its verse revealed nothing of the gritty reality of Williams's experiences as an inner-city physician. At this point, Williams found the physical nature of the human body too limited a subject for poetry -- a position that would later change dramatically. 

Not long after the publication of Poems , Williams went abroad again, to Leipzig, where he did postgraduate work in paediatrics. On a trip to London, he renewed his friendship with Pound , who exposed Williams to what he refers to in his autobiography as an 'intense literary atmosphere' that he found 'thrilling'. In an earlier letter to Williams, Pound had assessed the Platonic, idealised aspirations of Poems : 'Individual, original, it is not. Great art it is not. [. . .] nowhere I think do you add anything to the poets you have used as models.' This unmitigated directness pushed the young Williams to reconsider his approach and begin to find his own voice. 

After a brief period of travel in Italy and Spain, Williams returned to Rutherford to settle down. In December 1912 he married Florence Herman (the 'Flossie' featured in some of his last work), whom he had met three years earlier, and began to practise medicine and raise a family. During the next few years he and Florence had two boys, William in 1914 and Paul in 1916. With the help of her father, the Williamses bought a large house at 9 Ridge Road, a residence at which Williams would remain for the rest of his life. 

In 1913 Elkin Mathews, Pound 's publisher, issued a second collection, The Tempers , in London. This book was still derivative -- only this time Williams's major influence was none other than Pound . While Williams was moving towards a more abstract definition of art, it was primarily his poems' form that reflected Pound 's influence; his subject matter remained romantic in nature and continued to be largely informed by emotion. 

The Armory Show of 1913, a groundbreaking exhibition of modern art, had invigorated New York's literary scene, and Williams was restless at its outskirts. He wrote in the evenings, working against his Victorian poetic inheritance towards the emerging style of imagism. Championed by Pound , imagist poetry favoured precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Williams often spent weekends in New York, and within a few years he had there become associated with Marianne Moore , Wallace Stevens , Maxwell Bodenheim , Edna St Vincent Millay , Kenneth Burke and the artist Marcel Duchamp. He also befriended Alfred Kreymborg , editor of the pioneering magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse , which was instrumental in establishing the terms and spirit of modernist poetry. Kreymborg published Williams's work in the magazine and included several of his poems in the Others anthology (1916). Williams's poems also appeared regularly in the imagist poetry collections compiled by both Pound and Amy Lowell . His third volume, Al Que Quiere! (1917), which Williams translated as 'To Him That Wants It', reflected his Spanish roots. 

Williams continued to write poems during the 1920s, but fewer and fewer writers shared his austere vision of the future of American poetry. In the prologue to his poetry collection Kora in Hell (1920), Williams gives an early glimpse of his stance, splitting modern poetry into two opposing forces, the 'stay-at-homes' -- those who in Williams's view were committed to the future of American poetry, a group that included himself -- and the 'expatriates' -- Pound , H.D. , Eliot and others who had left the United States to live in Europe. Williams next published Sour Grapes (1921) and Spring and All (1923), a poetry collection in which he investigates the theme of the body's essential infirmity and its relationship to time as to an insurmountable foe. 

Williams won the Dial Award for poetry in 1926. During the 1930s he wrote two more books of poetry, An Early Martyr (1935) and Adam and Eve and the City (1936). His Complete Poems 1921-1931 was published in 1934 and The Complete Collected Poems followed four years later. Despite this activity, however, Williams the poet had become largely marginalised. In fact, he spent most of his sixth decade writing prose and critical essays that were often filled with invective against his peers. In these essays he also expounded upon his theory of poetry and made his famous statement, 'A poem is a machine made of words.' 

Finally, Williams wrote the poem that would begin a new era of appreciation in his literary career. In 1946 he published the first book of Paterson , the epic poem he had been struggling to write for nearly 20 years. The protagonist of the poem is a doctor-poet Williams surrogate who lives in the industrial town of Paterson, New Jersey, and is himself named Paterson. This sprawling work, with its idiomatic language and natural rhythms, focuses on revealing the poetic essence of the mundane in the lives of the townspeople of Paterson, and it serves as an earthy counterpart to Williams's early attempts to transcend the flesh in verse. Paterson was published as a series of five separate volumes between 1946 and 1958; Williams also wrote part of a sixth book, which was published posthumously in 1963. 

Williams was a remarkably prolific writer whose work encompassed many forms. He published two books of essays, In the American Grain (1925), Selected Essays (1954); a third, The Embodiment of Knowledge , was published posthumously in 1974. He also wrote fiction, including a collection of short stories entitled Make Light of It (1950) and the novels A Voyage to Pagany (1928), a three-volume chronicle loosely based on the experiences of his wife's family as immigrants; White Mule (1937); In the Money (1940); and The Build-Up (1952). His plays include A Dream of Love (1948) and Many Loves (1950); the latter had a successful Off-Broadway run in 1961. Later volumes of his poetry include Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Earlier Poems (1951), The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955). His Selected Letters appeared in 1957. Williams also wrote a biography of his mother, Yes, Mrs. Williams (1959). His stories and plays are compiled in The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961) and Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1961). 

In 1948 Williams suffered a heart attack, the first of the chronic health problems that would plague him for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, that same year he published the second volume of Paterson , the play A Dream of Love , and several small collections of poems. In 1949 he published Selected Poems and the third book of Paterson , for which he was awarded the National Book Award in 1950. Williams also won the Russell Loines Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was made a fellow of the Library of Congress, which he followed by publishing Paterson Book Four and The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams in 1951. 

In March 1951, however, Williams had his first of several strokes and retired, turning his medical practice over to his son. In August 1952 he had another serious stroke. Although he shared the Bollingen Prize for Poetry with Archibald MacLeish in 1953, because of his alleged associations with communism and his friendship with known fascist Ezra Pound , Williams was denied the position of consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. Feeling that his character and loyalty to his country had been publicly called into question, he fell into a depression, for which he was hospitalised. 

As Williams's health and mental condition continued to deteriorate, he published in 1955 one of his most famous love poems, 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower', in the collection Journey to Love . This poem of confession to his wife, Flossie, in which he asks her forgiveness for past infidelities, is widely recognised as one of his finest, most emotionally accessible works. 

In October 1955 Williams had a third stroke, followed by a further series of strokes that left him debilitated. In 1962 New Directions published what would be his last poetry collection, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems . For this book he was posthumously awarded the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He died in Rutherford on 4 March 1963. 

Essentially a postmodernist born into a modernist era, Williams's literary influence grew as the poetry scene changed to better reflect his sensibilities. He mentored Charles Olson , Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov , poets instrumental to the development of the Black Mountain School. Elements of Williams's relationship to place in Paterson are reflected clearly in Olson 's treatment of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in his epic Maximus Poems (published in the 1960s and 1970s). Beat poet Allen Ginsberg also cited Williams as a dramatic influence on his poetry, even though their styles are decidedly different. Apparently the admiration was mutual; Williams includes some of Ginsberg 's poetry in Paterson . Williams's friendship and correspondence with Kenneth Burke lasted more than 40 years. In his book William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture (1993), Brian Bremen argues that Burke 's literary theories constitute 'an essential means of understanding Williams's writing, just as Williams's writing provides an important critique of Burke's work'. 

Published in 1966, William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays was the first compilation of criticism devoted to the poet. J. Hillis Miller , who edited the volume, championed its significance as a representation of the 'development of literary taste in America since the '20s'. Noteworthy among the volume's critical perspectives on Williams are essays by Pound , Moore , Burke , Stevens , Robert Lowell and Thom Gunn . More than four decades later, the continually growing body of scholarship on Williams attests to the magnitude and depth of his influence on modern poetry. In her 1998 essay 'After Free Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries', Marjorie Perloff states that the history of free verse in English 'remains to be written: when it is, it will be clear that the dominant example has been, not that of Ezra Pound , whose ideographic page has only recently become a model for poets, but that of William Carlos Williams, whose verse signature is still a powerful presence'. This position hardly could have been anticipated during the 1920s and 1930s, when Williams had turned largely to prose and considered himself a failed poet labouring in Eliot 's shadow. 

In his essay 'William Carlos Williams' Paterson : A Map and Opinion' ( College English 26; 1965), Richard Gustafson observes that the poem moves from 'the trials that end in failure in the first three books to the trials that succeed in the last two'; he also states, 'Not only does the entire poem flow from negative to positive, so also do the rhythms of each book. Each has three sections, the first showing the striving, the second the failure, and the third the continuation of the life in resignation.' This pattern is also discussed by Daniel Morris in his essay 'William Carlos Williams: Paterson' ( A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture ; 2006). Morris charts the development of the character of Paterson from the self-involved frustration and struggle of Book One to the character's greater integration into the place, society and culture of the town of Paterson in Book Five. 

Current criticism is not limited to Paterson . The William Carlos Williams Society has sponsored two conferences to present Williams scholarship. The first was held in July 2005 and the other in July 2007, both in Frankfurt, Germany. A book on the first conference, which includes the collected papers of the presenters, was published under the title The Heritages of William Carlos Williams: Points of Contact (2007). 

With the exception of Paterson , Williams's poems have been gathered together in chronological order in the two-volume The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (1986 and 1988), edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. M.L. Rosenthal published The William Carlos Williams Reader (1966), and Charles Tomlinson edited a Selected Poems (1985). See also the biography by Paul Mariani , William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981); and Emily Mitchell Wallace's A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams (1968). 

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