William Carlos Williams

Poet

• Born: September 17, 1883
• Birthplace: Rutherford, New Jersey
• Died: March 4, 1963
• Place of death: Rutherford, New Jersey

American poet and physician

Williams was a pediatrician and physician whose poetry gradually earned him recognition as one of America’s greatest literary figures. His multicultural heritage, extensive travel, associations with other writers, and close ties to his hometown all informed and enriched his writing.

Areas of achievement: Poetry; medicine

Early Life

William Carlos Williams, the elder of two boys, was born into an immigrant, multicultural household in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. His father, William George Williams, an English businessman, was well-traveled, cosmopolitan, and a lover of William Shakespeare and Dante Alighieri. His mother, the former Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb, a descendant of Basques on her mother’s side and Dutch Sephardic Jews on her father’s, had been born into a Spanish-speaking home in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, and raised in Santo Domingo. As a child, Williams’s first language was Spanish, his second French, and English only his third. His middle name honored his mother’s brother, Carlos Hoheb, a surgeon in Santo Domingo.

Williams’s family traveled frequently to Europe, especially Switzerland and France, including a stay from 1897 to 1899, during which Williams studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. In 1899, his parents enrolled him in the progressive Horace Mann School in Manhattan. After graduating, he entered the School of Dental Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) in 1902 but soon transferred to its School of Medicine. While in Philadelphia, he met poets Ezra Pound, then a fellow Penn student, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), then a student at Bryn Mawr College, and was a member of the Mask and Wig dramatic society at Penn.

After receiving his M.D. degree from Penn in 1906, Williams interned for two years at the French Hospital in Manhattan, where several physicians were Puerto Rican friends of his family and most of his patients were immigrants who spoke little or no English. He cut short a second internship in 1909 by resigning from Nursery and Children’s Hospital in Manhattan rather than obey orders to falsify records. Upon returning from a pediatric residency in Leipzig, Germany, he established a private medical practice in Rutherford in 1910 and specialized in pediatrics and obstetrics there for the rest of his career.

In 1909, Williams proposed marriage to Charlotte Herman, who chose his younger brother Edgar instead. Confused and brokenhearted, he proposed to her younger sister Flossie, whom he hardly knew, and married her on December 12, 1912.

Life’s Work

Having begun to write poetry in both English and Spanish, Williams self-published his first book, Poems, in Rutherford in 1909. Pound managed the publication of Williams’s second book, The Tempers, in 1913. Williams subsidized the publication of his third, Al que quiere!, in 1917. Thereafter, his road to literary acceptance became easier.

Around 1915, Williams established his routine of practicing medicine on weekdays, writing on weeknights, and spending weekends in Manhattan with poets such as Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and artists such as Marcel Duchamp. He found inspiration for the rhythms and forms of his poems in cubism, Dada, jazz, and other avant-garde movements. He also made occasional trips to Europe, where he visited Pound, James Joyce, Man Ray, and various French painters. One result of these associations was a mutual influence between his poetry and early Surrealist painting.

Williams, like Pound, Doolittle, and T. S. Eliot, rebelled against the strict verse forms that, with notable exceptions such as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), had hitherto dominated English-language poetry. Together they created the Imagist movement, in which poetry became primarily the vehicle for sharp, clear, sometimes ambiguous mental images, as if the poet were painting on the canvas of the reader’s mind. Williams, however, reacted against Pound’s and Eliot’s esoteric allusions and sought instead, like Robert Frost, to anchor his poetry in immediate experience, ordinary things, and locally familiar phenomena. He joined Moore and Stevens in rejecting poetry that appealed only to academics and tried to make poetry speak plainly to the intelligent laity, who understood only everyday language.

Williams’s poem, “A Sort of a Song,” contained his literary motto, “Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent!” by which he meant that his images and language should be precise, trenchant, and denotative rather than allusive. Taking Moore’s advice to experiment with the rhythms and verse forms of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, Williams developed what he called the “variable foot,” so that the meter of his poems would resemble common American speech. His poems thus flirted with the boundary between poetry and prose. He even identified some of his most important works, such as Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), Spring and All (1923), and Paterson (1946-1958), as consisting of prose poems. Other major works include Pictures from Brueghel (1962) and The Great American Novel (1923).

Even though Williams was partly incapacitated by a heart attack in 1948 and several subsequent strokes, he suffered persecution during the Joseph McCarthy era and as a result was hospitalized for clinical depression in 1953. Williams died in his sleep at home on March 4, 1963.

Significance

Williams was a prolific and multifaceted writer. Besides contributing poetry to magazines and journals, he published twenty-one books of poetry, mostly collected works, as well as novels, drama, short stories, nonfiction, and several autobiographical works. Volumes of his correspondence with Pound and many other poets have been published, and major archival collections at Yale University, the University of Delaware, and the State University of New York at Buffalo provide additional material. General recognition of Williams’s literary accomplishments did not arrive until he was in his sixties, yet he quickly ranked among the most admired of American poets. He strived through both his writing and his medical practice to instill humanistic, patient-centered values in medicine. He was a pioneer in the empathy that began in the late twentieth century to replace paternalism as the foundation of the physician-patient relationship. This aspect of his work can be discerned in his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Politically and culturally Williams was an internationalist and a socialist. He was critical of the influence of the upper classes on civilization, society, and justice. He welcomed what he perceived as his duty to enhance human progress by fostering younger poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, and Harold Harwell Lewis. As such, he was the de facto godfather of several avant-garde movements in American poetry, notably the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and Black Mountain. The heart of his legacy is the legitimation of free verse and the development of a uniquely American idiom accessible to everyone, not just erudite readers of poetry.

Bibliography

Ahearn, Barry. William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Discusses Williams’s association with Ezra Pound and the origins of the Imagist movement.

Baldwin, Neil. To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, the Doctor Poet. Baltimore: Imprint Editions/Black Classic Press, 2008. Explores New Jersey influences on Williams’s work.

Berry, Wendell. The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011. Berry compares his own experiences as a poet of Henry County, Kentucky, with Williams’s as a poet of Rutherford, New Jersey.

Copestake, Ian D. The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry. Rochester, N.H.: Camden House, 2010. Traces the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Unitarianism on Williams.

Halter, Peter. The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Considers the symbiotic relationship between Williams’s poetry and several movements within early twentieth-century European painting.

Marz, Julio. The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994. Seeks to establish Williams as a proponent of Latino values, an interpreter of Latino culture, and a poet whose oded messages in English bore witness to his Latino heritage.

Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: Random House, 1951. Williams’s autobiography is a useful resource on his life and work.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother. New York: New Directions, 1982. A supplement to Williams’s autobiography that discusses his mother’s Hispanic traditions and their relationship.