William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a Puerto Rican-American poet whose work was central to the Imagism and Modernism movements. He operated in a variety of registers, from plainspoken to lyrical to darkly sardonic, but was always concerned with creating clear, visceral images. Poet Randall Jarrell said that, in his work, Williams "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." He is now recognized as a pioneer of a certain sort of plainspoken verse, which prizes immediacy and clarity over the perceived excesses of romantic poetry. His writing is commonly known for its starkness and focus, and his most famous collections include Spring and All, The Desert Music and Other Poems, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, and Paterson. Perhaps his most recognized work is the poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which prominently features a sparse, minimal aesthetic.
Williams was born on September 17th, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father was English and his mother was Puerto Rican. His father introduced him to the works of Dante and Shakespeare at a young age, for which he credits his early literary education. He attended Horace Mann High School in the Bronx and went on to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. From a young age, Williams was continually struggling with the weight of his parents' expectations for a stable career in medicine, which ran counter to his artistic ambitions. In the end, Williams would achieve both. In his hometown of Rutherford, he went into private practice as a doctor for forty years. He often claimed that his everyday interactions with his patients had a significant impact on his work. He believed witnessing their serious struggles reshaped his view of the world and the type of art he wanted to create. He tried to find a poetic form that allowed him to portray the varied contents of these lives, with all their difficulties and joys.
Williams published his first book of poems, Poems, in 1909, followed by The Tempers in 1913. However, it was not until the publication of Spring and All in 1923 that critics began to recognize and praise his formal achievements. The book contained many of the poems for which he would become best-known: "By the road to the contagious hospital," "The Red Wheelbarrow," and "To Elsie." Unlike some of his contemporaries, Williams was specifically trying to remove layers of allusion and artifice in his work. He began to become more and more concerned with creating work that was open and accessible, free of the intertextual references of some of his peers' writing. He had a particularly strong reaction against T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, feeling that it was simultaneously brilliant and shrouded in obscure touchstones, making it legible only to literary insiders.
After a lengthy period of reconsideration, Williams began work on his epic poem, Paterson. Published in multiple sections between 1946 and 1958, Paterson detailed the daily lives of various inhabitants of the New Jersey city of the same name. Williams closely modeled the work on James Joyce's Ulysses, as he was attempting to capture "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city." The lengthy transition period between this project and his previous collection was due in large part to his development of new stylistic techniques. The most notable of these was his meticulous practice of prosody (rhythmic patterns in poetry) which allowed him to reshape his lines to be untethered from non-American literary traditions but still demonstrate a verbal dexterity in line with Modernists like Eliot and Pound. After considering the formal construction of the work, Williams shifted his focus to journalistically collecting fragments of information about the city and its population, making frequent visits there. In his own words, he described his process as an almost patchwork-like stitching together: "I started to make trips to the area. I walked around the streets; I went on Sundays in summer when the people were using the park, and I listened to their conversation as much as I could. I saw whatever they did, and made it part of the poem." The final product was a mosaic of city life that brought together several levels of scale, ranging from the macro (Paterson Falls) to the micro (suburban stories, letters from friends). While Williams pursued his own uniquely American poetic voice, this blending of the intimate and the historical marked him clearly as a Modernist in the camp of Woolf, Joyce, and Pound. Critical reception of the work was somewhat more mixed, with reviewers praising certain sections of the poem more than others. However, recent assessments of the project as a whole designate it as Williams's masterwork.
In his later career, Williams developed a close relationship with poet Allen Ginsburg and became a major influence on both the Beat and Black Mountain schools of poetry. While variable in their focus, Black Mountain poets like Gary Snyder were more concerned with nature imagery and the influence of haiku than Ginsburg and his more metropolitan-centric contemporaries. But both schools of writers admired Williams's formal daring and pointed use of simplicity as it both captured the textures of everyday life and offered the reader more emotional accessibility. In light of this appreciation, Williams had something of a career renaissance in the 1950s. His final book of poems was Pictures From Brueghel and Other Poems, for which he posthumously received the Pulitzer Prize. This collection contained one of his most celebrated works, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," which detailed the scene in the Bruegel painting of the same name, in which a farmer fails to take note of the mythic figure Icarus's plunge into the ocean. Many of the other poems in the collection engage in a similar mode of ekphrasis, attempting to extract and amplify the central themes of various Bruegel paintings.
After a period of declining health, Williams died on March 4, 1963. Williams received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1950 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953. He was also posthumously awarded the Gold Medal for Poetry by the National Institute for Arts and Letters in 1962. His work is remembered for its close attention to detail, commitment to formal innovation, and unvarnished evocations of commonplace beauty.
