Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), American poet, novelist, short story writer, and, for many years, a paediatrician. In his student days he was a friend of
Pound and H.
Doolittle, and some early poems (
Poems, 1909;
The Tempers, 1913) are Imagist, although he was to move from
Imagism to what he called Objectivism. His poems range from the minimal eight-line, sixteen-word ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (1923) to his most ambitious production,
Paterson (1946–58), a long, five-part, free-verse, collage-mixed evocation of a characteristic industrial city, with the mystic motif, ‘man is himself a city’. The title of his last collection,
Pictures from Brueghel (1963), suggests the plain, poverty-stricken subjects of some of his verse and prose; and his skill at painting the ordinary with freshness and compassion is manifested in his short stories, collected as
The Farmers' Daughters (1961). Other prose works include
In the American Grain (1925), an important series of essays exploring the nature of American literature and the influence of Puritanism in American culture. Williams's work was more or less disregarded in Britain until the 1950s. Recently interest has increased considerably, and he is now established as one of the masters of
Modernism.
