William+Carlos+Williams+(1883-1963)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet who was associated with modernism and the Imagist movement. Although he studied and worked primarily as a physician, attending and graduating from the Universityof Pennsylvania, he became known as an important literary figure, with works consisting of poetry, short stories, plays, novels, essays, translations and letters. In 1915 he began to associate with a group known as “The Others,” a group based out of New York City and consisting of other artists including Alfred Kreymborg, Man Ray, Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Marcel Duchamp. Additionally, Williams had a significant influence on those of the Beat Generation, especially on fellow poet Allen Ginsberg, to whom he served as a mentor. Williams’ major collections include //Kora in Hell// (1920), //Spring and// //All// (1923), //Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems// (1962), //Paterson// (1963), and //Imaginations// (1970). In addition to being remembered each year with the presenting of an award in his honor by the Poetry Society of America, he is also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for //Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems// as well as the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. After suffering a heart attack in 1948 and subsequent declining health, Williams died in 1963 at the age of seventy-nine.

Not in favor of traditional theme or form, Williams preferred the blemishes, saying of his form, as told by A. Kingsley Weatherhead, “‘No new thing comes from perfect’” (125). Williams implemented in his poetry a sense of locality. As opposed to poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot who tended to allude to foreign and classical themes, Williams concentrated on the world as he knew it was and included aspects of the everyday life of the common people. At times downplaying the distinction between poetry and prose, Williams believed that poetry should be treated rhythmically. As Weatherhead states, “the need for rhythm is the important qualification: very often in Williams it is only the existence of rhythm in a poem that distinguishes it from prose; and often, incidentally, that rhythm makes only the slightest impression on the ear” (118). Favoring unconventional form, in many of his poems Williams ignored traditional meter and rhythm, experimenting with lines and eventually developing the “stepped triadic line” which is simply a long line that is separated into three segments. Of this line development, "If each part of the line is equivalent to a beat then the three parts are equal in length to each other and so are the full lines, to this extent the verse is regular. But since each part of the line and hence each full line may contain a widely variable number of syllables, the form is flexible" (Weatherhead 124). This form was utilized in the poetry of his later years, specifically the last decade of his life. This line formation transfers what would otherwise be considered nothing more than images, observations, etc into poetry.