William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (b. 1883–d. 1963) is now recognized as an American poet who was a major influence on later poetry in English, especially on American poetry, although his reputation during his lifetime grew slowly. He also wrote plays, novels, short stories, translations, essays, and an autobiography. Often characterized as an early Imagist poet, who knew Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)—both also associated with Imagism—from their time together at the University of Pennsylvania, Williams equally experimented with other poetic styles, inspired by early-20th-century modernist movements in literature and the visual art including Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, and Precisionism. The number of genres and styles at which Williams tried his hand make it difficult to characterize his literary work or legacy succinctly. The son of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother who emigrated from Puerto Rico to the United States and settled in Rutherford, New Jersey, to raise their family, Williams grew up in a household where English, Spanish, and French were spoken; he attended secondary school outside Geneva, Switzerland, from 1897 through 1899. He then studied at the Horace Mann School in New York and entered the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, graduating in 1906, following which he interned in New York and studied pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany. While Williams is accurately associated with championing the local—including in his writing details of his life and work in his home town, to which he returned to set up a practice as a doctor working with patients who were often poor, immigrants, or minorities—Williams was not provincial. He knew German along with Spanish, French, and English; he was active in arts communities in the New York City area, and he edited or coedited a number of small arts magazines even as he earned his living as a doctor. His first two books of poetry—the self-published Poems (1909) and The Tempers (1913)—were not particularly notable or noticed, although by the time he published Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), The Great American Novel, and Spring and All (the last two both in 1923) his work attracted more attention, even if it was still at first not widely known. By 1963, he had published forty-nine books and pamphlets, won a National Book Award, and was posthumously awarded both a Pulitzer Prize and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.