William Carlos Williams

After graduating from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, William Carlos Williams had a serious medical career in pediatrics, setting up private practice in his native town of Rutherford, New Jersey. Eventually he became head pediatrician of the General Hospital in Paterson. But Williams soon discovered his potential as a writer, and played an active role in the avant-garde poetic movements of New York City and Europe. He published his first literary work, 'Poems,' in 1909. Williams became known for his realistic portrayals of women and revulsion against fascism, as well as his desire to create a specifically American poetry based on the rhythms and colorations of American speech, thought, and experience. He wrote stories, plays and prose. His 'Autobiography' (1951), devoted to both the medical and poetic aspects of his life, drew heavily on his experience with his working-class patients, especially the women, whose babies he delivered and whose hardy courage he admired. Williams expressed the nation's character, especially its urban volatility: its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behavior, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history. His sequence of poems 'Paterson,' dedicated to his downtrodden hometown, was published serially between 1946 and 1961. It was a search for the elements of a 'common language': a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society. "No ideas but in things," he wrote on the first page. Williams gradually emerged as one of the great forces in twentieth-century verse. His striking experiments are expressive of American sensibility, saturated with speech and its rhythms, drawing comparisons to Whitman. The Beat poets showed strong traces of his influence. He died in 1963, the same year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.