William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Pound became a great influence in Williams' writing, and in 1913 arranged for the London publication of Williams's second collection, The Tempers. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Following Pound, he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though as time went on, he began to increasingly disagree with the values put forth in the work of Pound and especially Eliot, who he felt were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His influence as a poet spread slowly during the twenties and thirties, overshadowed, he felt, by the immense popularity of Eliot's "The Waste Land"; however, his work received increasing attention in the 1950s and 1960s as younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, were impressed by the accessibility of his language and his openness as a mentor. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970). Williams's health began to decline after a heart attack in 1948 and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey in 1963.

This bio was last updated on Jun 21, 2001.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Letters

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William Carlos Williams exhibits on this site:

• The Modernist Revolution: Make It New!
   

William Carlos Williams exhibits elsewhere on the web:

• William Carlos Williams
  A detailed biography and an assortment of materials at Gale's Poetry Resource Center.
   
• William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
  A collection of critical, historical, and biographical information at the Modern American Poetry site.
   
• William Carlos Williams
  Biography, critical overview, bibliography, and links from Addison-Wesley's Literature Online, "A site to support Kennedy & Gioia's Literature, 7th Edition."
   
• New York University Literature, Arts & Medicine Database
  Annotations of Physician Authors.
   
• William Carlos Williams
  At Levi Asher's Literary Kicks site.
   
• William Carlos Williams Review
  A biannual publication subsidized in part by the University of Texas at Austin.
   
• Video: "The Great Figure"
  A dynamic rendition of the poem (Quicktime, 62 seconds) from Voices & Visions, a video series in the Annenberg/CPB Multimedia Collection.
   
• Communion: William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman
  An essay by Eric Elliott, December 1989.
   
• Amy Munno's William Carlos Williams page
  Poems paired with the paintings that inspired them.
   
• William Carlos Williams's Influence on Kenneth Burke
  An essay by David Blakesley of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, presented at the Modern Language Association Conference, Toronto, December 1997.
   

Danse Russe

from "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

The Red Wheelbarrow

Spring and All

This Is Just To Say

To a Poor Old Woman

To Elsie 

Tract

Night on the Great River [three translations]
trans. William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth
Gary Snyder