Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. His father, William George Williams, was born in England but raised from "a very young age" in the Dominican Republic;[2] his mother, Raquel Hélène Hoheb, from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was of French extraction.[3][4]
Scholars note that the Caribbean culture of the family home had an important influence on Williams. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "English was not his primary means of communication until he was a teenager. At home his mother and father—who were raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively—spoke Spanish with each other and to young William Carlos."[5] While he wrote in English, "the poet's first language" was Spanish and his "consciousness and social orientation" were shaped by Caribbean customs; his life influenced "to a very important degree by a plural cultural foundation."[6]
Williams 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, having passed a special examination, was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906.[7][8] Upon leaving Penn, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York, then went to Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics.[7] He published his first book, Poems, in 1909.
Williams married Florence ("Flossie") Herman (1891–1976) in 1912 after he returned from Germany.[7] They moved into a house on 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, New Jersey, where they resided for many years.[9] 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 had met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1914, Williams and his wife had their first son, William E. Williams, followed by their second son, Paul H. Williams, in 1917.[10] Their first son also became a physician.[11]
Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. His work has a great affinity with painting, in which he had a lifelong interest. 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 Pound and H.D. (whom he had befriended during his medical studies at Penn), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his style changed to express his commitment to a modernist expression of his immediate environment.
In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (including H.D., Pound and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his more experimental books Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Pound called the work "incoherent" and H.D. thought the book was "flippant".[12] The Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa criticized Williams's sexual and artistic politics in her experimental prose poem review titled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'", published in The Little Review in March 1921.[13] Williams had an affair with the Baroness, and published three poems in Contact, describing the forty-year-old as "an old lady" with "broken teeth [and] syphilis".[14]
Three years later, in 1923, Williams published Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, which contained the classic poems "By the road to the contagious hospital", "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie". However, in 1922, the publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land had become a literary sensation that overshadowed Williams's very different brand of poetic modernism. In his Autobiography, Williams later wrote of "the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land."[9] He said,
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.
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.[15] Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English.[16]
During the 1930s, Williams began working on an opera. Titled The First President, it was focused on George Washington and his influence on the history of the United States of America and was intended to "galvanize us into a realization of what we are today."[17]
—Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light!
from Paterson: Book I
In his modernist epic collage of place titled Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, Williams wrote his own modern 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 mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had a 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.[18]
One of Williams's more dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jersey poet 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 first book, Howl and Other Poems in 1956.
Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, and after 1949, a series of strokes. Severe depression after one such stroke caused him to be confined to Hillside Hospital, New York, for four months in 1953. He died on March 4, 1963, at age 79 at his home in Rutherford.[19][20] He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.[21]
