Williams, William Carlos Essay, Research Paper
I. Introduction
Print section
Williams, William Carlos (1883-1963), American writer, whose
use of simple, direct language marked a new course in
20th-century poetry. Unlike some other writers of his time, such
as T. S. Eliot, Williams avoided complexity and obscure
symbolism. Instead, he produced lyrics, such as this one from
“January Morning” (1938), that contain few difficult references:
“All this-/ was for you, old woman./ I wanted to write a poem/
that you would understand.” Williams’s greatest achievement as
a writer was the epic Paterson (5 volumes, 1946-1958), which is
a landmark of 20th-century poetry.
II. Life and Works
Print section
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father, William
George Williams, was from Britain, and his mother, Helene Raquel
Williams, was a Puerto Rican-born woman of Basque and French
descent. Williams grew up in a household that spoke French,
Spanish, and British English. He entered the University of
Pennsylvania Medical School in 1902, and while there formed
friendships with several poets who would go on to great fame:
Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle. After an
internship in New York City, Williams studied pediatrics at the
University of Leipzig in Germany. By late 1912, Williams had
returned to Rutherford, set up a private practice, and married his
fianc?e of several years, Florence Hermann.
Although he developed a busy practice as a doctor, Williams also
was a prolific writer, and for much of his life he published a book
at least every two years. His most important prose works are
The Great American Novel (1923); In the American Grain (1925),
a collection of essays on figures from American history; and
White Mule (1938), the first novel in a three-book series following
the life of one family.
In addition to Paterson, Williams’s various poetry collections
include The Collected Early Poems (1938), The Collected Later
Poems (1950), and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
(1962), which is a collection of works written from 1950 to 1962.
Williams began to achieve public recognition for his writing in
1950, when he won the National Book Award in poetry for the
third volume of Paterson. Three years later he won the Bollingen
Prize-awarded by Yale University for achievement in American
poetry-and in 1963, after his death, Williams won a Pulitzer Prize
for poetry for Pictures from Brueghel.
III. Poetic Ideas
Print section
Poetry was, for Williams, a crucial and necessary-yet sometimes
ignored-means of communicating. In “Asphodel, That Greeny
Flower” (1955), he wrote, “It is difficult/ to get the news from
poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is
found there.” Williams’s ideas were basically humanistic: respect
yourself and others, love those you can, and try to make the
world a better place. He tried to live up to these ideals through
both his writing and his medical practice. One quality that
Williams admired greatly was persistence; he loved old people
who kept their vigorous response to life, just as he admired
artists who kept improving and perfecting their work.
Williams’s straightforward approach to writing marked a new
direction for poetry. In shaping his idea of what this new poetry
should be, Williams emphasized four qualities. The first was the
use of commonplace subjects and themes. The poet must write
about things people can respond to, things people have seen and
know. Otherwise, literature stands separate from its readers.
The second principle for the new poetry was the poet’s duty to
write about real events or objects in a language that all people
could understand, with an ear for the way people actually speak.
Williams called his language “the American idiom” and stressed
repeatedly that it was different from formal English in that it
allowed for speech patterns that could violate grammatical rules.
He delighted in experimenting with short poems that were little
more than fragments of speech capturing individual moments,
thoughts, feelings, or images, as in “This Is Just To Say” (1934):
“I have eaten/ the plums/ that were/ in the icebox…”
The third attribute for the new poetry was specificity. Williams
objected to traditional poetry that talked in generalities, such as
poems that treated love, death, anger, and friendship as
abstractions rather than as real things. Fighting against what he
called aboutness, Williams coined the phrase “No ideas but in
things.” This meant that his poetry made its point by focusing
attention on concrete reality. To show an emotion such as love,
he would write about the everyday gestures that represented
the emotion, such as a heartfelt apology. Also, Williams paid
attention to simple objects, like red wheelbarrows, that other
poets ignored, and he found poetic qualities in these everyday
objects.
The fourth principle of Williams’s new poetics was the poet’s
responsibility to write about his or her locale, or in the wording
he preferred, local. Williams believed that only by knowing a small
fragment of life thoroughly could anyone hope to understand the
total picture of human existence. Much of his own writing efforts
for more than a decade went into the epic Paterson, a long poem
presenting his local, which was industrialized New Jersey. Nature,
represented in the poem by the Passaic River and its well-known
falls, met with industry in the town of Paterson, where the falls
provided waterpower to the area. In the work Williams made a
number of statements about modern life-for instance about the
importance, to cities and people, of observing and maintaining
specific details in order to maintain a sense of individuality and
importance.
Bibliography
Toward the end of his life Williams was recognized as an
important influence on younger poets. Long before he was
esteemed by critics, such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth
Rexroth, Robert Lowell, and Denise Levertov paid tribute to old
“Doc Williams,” the man who meshed two careers into one highly
productive life. Williams’s letters to these poets and to others
resulted in numerous collections, including The Selected Letters
of William Carlos Williams (1957) and several volumes published
after his death, such as The Last Word: Letters between Marcia
Nardi and William Carlos Williams (1994), Pound/Williams: Letters
of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996), and The
Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998