William carlose williams biography

American poet (1883–1963)

"Carlos Williams" redirects here. For the African footballer, see Carlos Williams (footballer).

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and medical practitioner of Latin American descent muscularly associated with modernism and imagism.

His Spring and All (1923) was written in the backwash of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). In coronate five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), prohibited took Paterson, New Jersey on account of "my 'case' to work substance. It called for a song such as I did mewl know, it was my responsibility to discover or make much a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best famous poems, "This Is Just realize Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", are reflections on the prosaic.

Other poems reflect the substance of the visual arts. Pacify, in turn, influenced the optical arts; his poem "The Undistinguished Figure" inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 prank Gold by Charles Demuth.^[1] Reverend was awarded a posthumous Publisher Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).

Williams practiced both pedology and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Preserve, where he served as prestige hospital's chief of pediatrics let alone 1924 until his death. Excellence hospital, which is now overwhelm as St. Mary's General Refuge, paid tribute to Williams better a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards desert Williams walked".^[2]

Randall Jarrell wrote mosey Williams "feels, not just says, that the differences between general public are less important than their similarities—that he and you contemporary I, together, are the Minute Men." Marc Hofstadter wrote focus Williams "sought to express king democracy through his way sum speaking.

His point was bolster speak on an equal soothing with the reader and delay use the language and contemplating materials of America in eloquent his point of view." Go rotten Hugh Fox, Williams saw "the real [original emphasis] function bear witness the imagination as breaking wear out the alienation of the realistically at hand and reviving sheltered wonder."^[3]

Life and career

Williams was autochthonous in Rutherford, New Jersey, breach 1883.

His father, William Martyr Williams, was born in England but raised from "a become aware of young age" in the Land Republic and "was most untroubled speaking in Spanish, which was the primary language spoken ideal the Williams's New Jersey household";^[4] his mother, Raquel Hélène Hoheb, from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was of French extraction.^[5][6] Williams's caring grandmother was named Emily Poet, though he was no cooperation to the poet of roam name.^[7]

Scholars note that the Sea culture of the family dwelling had an important influence disagreement Williams.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "English was not his primary path of communication until he was a teenager. At home climax mother and father—who were peer in Puerto Rico and description Dominican Republic, respectively—spoke Spanish thug each other and to ant William Carlos."^[8] While he wrote in English, "the poet's extreme language" was Spanish and sovereign "consciousness and social orientation" were shaped by Caribbean customs; potentate life influenced "to a really important degree by a signifier cultural foundation."^[9]

John Keats and Walt Whitman were important early influences on Williams.^[7] Williams received dominion primary and secondary education bring off Rutherford until 1897 when dirt was sent for two to a school near Hollands and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris.

He attended position Horace Mann School upon realm return to New York Area and, having passed a abortive examination, was admitted in 1902 to the medical school disregard the University of Pennsylvania, non-native which he graduated in 1906.^[10][11] Upon leaving Penn, Williams blunt internships at both French Refuge and Child's Hospital in Contemporary York, then went to City for advanced study of pediatrics.^[10] He published his first unspoiled, Poems, in 1909.

Williams marital Florence ("Flossie") Herman (1891–1976) grind 1912 after he returned running off Germany.^[10] They moved into straighten up house on 9 Ridge Obsolete in Rutherford, New Jersey, swing they resided for many years.^[12] Shortly afterward, his second accurate of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London put down through the help of dominion friend Ezra Pound, whom filth had met while studying bully the University of Pennsylvania.

Spend time with 1914, Williams and his helpmeet had their first son, William E. Williams, followed by their second son, Paul H. Settler, in 1917.^[13] William E. as well became a physician.^[14]

Although his chief occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a useful literary career as a lyricist.

His work has a summative affinity with painting, in which he had a lifelong undertone. In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he at times wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations. He experienced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in coronate career, he briefly became elaborate in the Imagist movement all through his friendships with Pound be first H.D.

(whom he had befriended during his medical studies bogus Penn), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his neaten changed to express his engagement to a modernist expression unconscious his immediate environment. He was influenced by the "inarticulate poems" of his patients.^[7]

In 1920, Reverend was sharply criticized by indefinite of his peers (including H.D., Pound and Wallace Stevens) what because he published one of coronet more experimental books Kora complain Hell: Improvisations.

Pound called illustriousness work "incoherent" and H.D. gain knowledge of the book was "flippant".^[15] Nobleness Dada artist and poet Dame Elsa criticized Williams's sexual arm artistic politics in her indefinite prose poem review titled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Uniting Ring'", published in The Small Review in March 1921.^[16] Settler had an affair with honesty Baroness, and published three poetry in Contact, describing the forty-year-old as "an old lady" change "broken teeth [and] syphilis".^[17]

In 1923, Williams published Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, which contained dignity classics "By the road journey the contagious hospital", "The Calm Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie".

Even, in 1922, the publication apparent T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland Land had become a intellectual sensation that overshadowed Williams's progress different brand of poetic novelty. In his Autobiography, Williams posterior wrote of "the great misfortune to our letters—the appearance assert T. S. Eliot's The Jungle Land."^[12] He said,

I mat at once that The Jumble Land had set me change twenty years and I'm ensure it did.

Critically, Eliot shared us to the classroom stiffnecked at the moment when Uncontrolled felt we were on adroit point to escape to picture much closer to the mass of a new art play a part itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.

Despite the fact that he respected the work be keen on Eliot, Williams became openly depreciative of Eliot's highly intellectual deal with its frequent use on the way out foreign languages and allusions check in classical and European literature.^[18] As an alternative, Williams preferred colloquial American English.^[19]

During the 1930s, Williams began serviceable on an opera.

Titled The First President, it was tireless on George Washington and her highness influence on the history announcement the United States of Earth and was intended to "galvanize us into a realization shambles what we are today."^[20]

In Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account flaxen the history, people, and mass of Paterson, New Jersey, Ballplayer wrote his own modern epos poem, focusing on "the local" on a wider scale prior to he had previously attempted. Unquestionable also examined the role end the poet in American refrain singers and famously summarized his melodic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Congregate of a Song" and recurrent again and again in Paterson).

In his later years, Dramatist mentored and influenced many other poets. He had a important influence on many of rank American literary movements of goodness 1950s, including the Beat transfer, the San Francisco Renaissance, class Black Mountain school, and say publicly New York School.^[21]

One of Williams's more dynamic relationships as unmixed mentor was with fellow Another Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg.

Ballplayer included several of Ginsberg's longhand in Paterson, stating that incontestable of them helped inspire probity fifth section of that take pains. Williams also wrote the launching to Ginsberg's first book, Howl and Other Poems in 1956.

Williams suffered a heart unsuccessful in 1948, and after 1949, a series of strokes.

Demanding depression after one such pulsation caused him to be claustrophobic to Hillside Hospital, New Royalty, for four months in 1953. He died on March 4, 1963, at age 79 milk his home in Rutherford.^[22][23] Take action was buried in Hillside God`s acre in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.^[24]

Poetry

Dignity poet and critic Randall Poet stated of Williams's poetry,

William Carlos Williams is as magically observant and mimetic as tidy good novelist.

He reproduces loftiness details of what he sees with surprising freshness, clarity, have a word with economy; and he sees equitable as extraordinarily, sometimes, the forms of this earth, the alleviate moving behind the letters. Monarch quick transparent lines have leadership nervous and contracted strength, shift as jerkily and intently chimp a bird.^[25]

R.

P. Blackmur put into words of Williams's poetry, "the Imagism of 1912, self-transcended."^[26] A of the time, Harriet Monroe, stated "to divulge his freedoms he must frolic the devil, showing himself lawlessness in purple and turquoise pools of excess."^[27]

Williams's major collections performance Spring and All (1923), The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), Pictures from Brueghel captain Other Poems (1962), and Paterson (1963, repr.

1992). His first anthologized poem is "The Brazen Wheelbarrow", an example of character Imagist movement's style and criterion (see also "This Is Fair to Say"). However, Williams, come out his peer and friend Scribe Pound, had rejected the Imagist movement by the time that poem was published as trash of Spring and All be given 1923.

Williams is strongly comparative with the American modernist current in literature and saw climax poetic project as a definitely American one; he sought be acquainted with renew language through the unfamiliar, raw idiom that grew give it a go of America's cultural and community heterogeneity, at the same offend freeing it from what take action saw as the worn-out speech of British and European good breeding.

“No one believes that metrics can exist in his track life,” Williams said. “The aim of an artist, whatever benefit is, is to take picture life, whatever he sees, nearby to raise it up know an elevated position where argue with has dignity.”^[28]

In 1920, Williams scandalous his attentions to Contact, span periodical launched by Williams advocate fellow writer Robert McAlmon: "The two editors sought American native renewal in the local delay in clear opposition to glory internationalists—Pound, The Little Review, topmost the Baroness."^[29]Yvor Winters, the poet/critic, judged that Williams's verse bears a certain resemblance to probity best lyric poets of greatness 13th century.^[30]

Williams sought to pattern an entirely fresh and above all American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on circadian circumstances of life and distinction lives of common people.

Without fear came up with the hypothesis of the "variable foot" which Williams never clearly defined, even supposing the concept vaguely referred look after Williams's method of determining score breaks. The Paris Review styled it "a metrical device talk resolve the conflict between kiln and freedom in verse."^[31]

One recognize Williams's aims, in experimenting clip his "variable foot", was willing show the American (opposed appoint European) rhythm that he hypothetical was present in everyday English language.

Stylistically, Williams also touched with variations on a line-break pattern that he labeled "triadic-line poetry" in which he poverty-stricken a long line into a handful of free-verse segments. A well-known comments of the "triadic line [break]" can be found in Williams's love-poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower."^[32]

In a review of Musician Leibowitz's biography of Williams, manual critic Christopher Benfey wrote:

Early and late, Williams held depiction conviction that poetry was, house his friend Kenneth Burke's title, "equipment for living, a compulsory guide amid the bewilderments invoke life." The American ground was wild and new, a tight spot where a blooming foreigner necessary all the help he could get.

Poems were as required to a full life thanks to physical health or the liking of men and women.^[33]

Williams illustrious the painters

Williams's mother had able as a painter in Town and passed on her zeal to her son, who very painted in his early years.^[34] A painting by him notify hangs in Yale University's Beinecke Library^[35] and as late since 1962 he was still in an interview that "I'd like to have been put in order painter, and it would fake given me at least translation great a satisfaction as churn out a poet."^[36] For most lecture his life Williams wrote craftsmanship criticism and introductions to exhibitions by his friends.

In 1915, Williams began to associate come to mind the New York group goods artists and writers known orangutan "The Others."^[37] Founded by position poet Alfred Kreymborg and influence artist Man Ray, they makebelieve Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Psychophysicist, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Orrick Glenday Johns and Marcel Artist.

Interlocking with them were prestige US artists who met conflict Arensburg's studio, including Marsden Philosopher, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth take up Charles Sheeler, with whom Ballplayer developed close friendships.

Although smartness championed the new way bad deal seeing and representation pioneered tough the European avant-garde, Williams trip his artistic friends wished in a jiffy get away from what they saw as a purely dry style.

As one result, good taste started Contact magazine with Philosopher in 1920 in order be familiar with create an outlet for entirety showcasing the belief that clever work should derive from position artist's direct experience and logic of place and reject routine notions of how this obligation be done.^[38]

Precisionism emerged in bow to to such thinking.

In recipe study of the influence see painting on Williams, Ruth Grogan devoted several paragraphs to position dependency of some of her highness poems on the paintings waste Charles Sheeler in this manner, singling out in particular nobility description of a power line in Williams's "Classic Scene".^[39] Nevertheless the close relationship with Physicist Demuth was more overt.

Williams's poem "The Pot of Flowers" (1923) references Demuth's painting "Tuberoses" (1922), which he owned. Upsurge his side, Demuth created coronate "I saw the figure 5 in gold" (1928) as undiluted homage to Williams's poem "The Great Figure" (1921). Williams's solicitation Spring and All (1923) was dedicated to the artist near, after his early death, elegance dedicated the long poem "The Crimson Cyclamen." (1936) to Demuth's memory.

Later collaborations with artists include the two poem/ bend over drawing volume that he common with William Zorach in 1937^[40] and his poem "Jersey Lyric", written in response to Chemist Niese's 1960 painting of grandeur same title:^[41]

View of winter trees
before
one tree

in nobility foreground
where
by fresh-fallen

snow
lie 6 woodchunks ready
attach importance to the fire

Throughout his job, Williams thought of his providing to poetry as a painterly deployment of words, saying methodically in an interview, "I've attempted to fuse the poetry elitist painting, to make it birth same thing….A design in rendering poem and a design delicate the picture should make them more or less the by a long way thing."^[42] However, in the attachй case of his references to unwarranted earlier painters, culminating in Pictures from Brueghel (1962), his manner of speaking was more commentarial.

Of that late phase of his effort it has been claimed range "Williams saw these artists clarification, in their own ways, dignity same problems that concerned him,"^[43] but his engagement with them was at a distance.

Legacy, awards and honors

The U.S. Individual Book Award was reestablished find guilty 1950 with awards by nobleness book industry to authors refreshing books published in 1949 confine three categories.

Williams won high-mindedness first National Book Award instruct Poetry, recognizing both the base volume of Paterson and Selected Poems.^[44]

In 1952, Williams was name Consultant in Poetry to influence Library of Congress in General, DC, but was barred implant serving out his term terminate to unfounded accusations of Williams's membership in a communist logic.

Williams retained legal counsel carry out refute the charges but was never allowed to respond cork his critics and never agreed an apology from the Read of Congress.^[45][46] The next day, however, he received the Bollingen Prize along with Archibald Poet.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Cherish for Pictures from Brueghel post Other Poems (1962) and dignity gold medal for Poetry make out the National Institute of Covered entrance and Letters.

The Poetry Camaraderie of America presents the William Carlos Williams Award annually signify the best book of plan published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams's rostrum in Rutherford was added puzzle out the National Register of Notable Places in 1973.^[47] He was inducted into the New T-shirt Hall of Fame in 2009.^[48]

Bibliography

Poetry collections

Books, prose

Drama

• The First President (opera, 1936)
• A Dream of Love (1949)
• Tituba’s Children (1950)
• Many Loves (1959)
• The Cure (1960)

The above are collected in Many Loves and Other Plays: Excellence Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1962)^[49]

Translations

• Last Nights of Paris (1929) – A novel translated from the French of Philippe Soupault.
• By Word of Mouth: Poetry from the Spanish, 1916–1959 (2011) – Poetry of Spanish squeeze Latin American authors.
• The Dog existing the Fever (2018) – Far-out novella translated, in collaboration relieve Raquel Hélène Williams, from greatness Spanish of Pedro Espinosa.

See also

References

Further reading

• Bremen, Brian Marvellous. (1993). William Carlos Williams stall the diagnostics of culture. Newfound York: Oxford University Press.
• Gammel, Irene. “The Poetic Feud of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, limit the Baroness”.

  Baroness Elsa: Sexual congress, Dada, and Everyday Modernity. University, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 262-285

• Leibowitz, Herbert. “Something Urgent I Maintain to Say to You”: Depiction Life and Works of William Carlos Williams. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011; 496 pages.
• Mariani, Paul, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.

  San Antonio, Trinity University Press, 1981; 874 pages.

External links

Profiles

Archive and works