Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963), born in Rutherford, N.J., his lifelong home, where he practiced medicine as a pediatrician. While studying at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School he became a friend of Pound and of H.D. and shared their subscription to the tenets of
Imagism, as is evident in his first books,
Poems (1909) and
The Tempers (1913), and, to some extent, in all the writing of his long career. However, the limited nature of Imagism was extended in
Al Que Quiere! (1917), the prose poems of
Kora in Hell (1920),
Sour Grapes (1921), and
Spring and All (1922) to
Expressionism, characterized by a clean stripping of poetry to essentials, by a holding of emotion at arm's length, and by vivid observations, restricted almost entirely to sensory experience. Williams declared that his poetry belonged to the school of
Objectivism, whose publications, like his
Collected Poems, 1921–1931 (1934), were issued from the short‐lived Objectivist Press. In its defense, Williams said: “Imagism …though it had been useful in ridding the field of verbiage, had no formal necessity implicit in it” and so “it had dribbled off into so‐called ‘free verse‘ …but, we argued, the poem …is an object …that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes …this was what we wished to imply by Objectivism.”
In this vein his poetry was continued in
An Early Martyr (1935),
Adam & Eve & The City (1936),
The Complete Collected Poems …1906–1938 (1938),
The Broken Span (1941),
The Wedge (1944),
The Desert Music (1954),
Journey to Love (1955), and
Pictures from Brueghel (1963, Pulitzer Prize). Marked by vernacular American speech and direct observation, his poetry has the character, he declared, that one finds “as a physician works upon a patient, upon the thing before him, in the particular to discover the universal.”
Paterson (5 vols., 1946–58) is a long, structureless poem, including much quoted prose, relating to the history, formal and informal, the surroundings, and the appearance of a New Jersey city and about one human figure, partly autobiographical, partly mythic.
His prose includes
The Great American Novel (1923), impressionistic essays;
In the American Grain (1925), more impressionistic essays, on discoverers of the New World from Eric the Red to Lincoln, bodying forth American values; and
Selected Essays (1954). He wrote plays collected in
Many Loves (1961); stories collected in
The Knife of the Times (1932),
Life Along the Passaic River (1938),
Make Light of It (1950), and
The Farmers' Daughters (1961); and four novels:
A Voyage to Pagany (1928), autobiographical fiction about a small‐town American doctor in Europe; and a trilogy,
White Mule (1937), about immigrants adjusting to the U.S.;
In the Money (1940), continuing the chronicle of a middle‐class family and its young children; and
The Build‐Up (1952), carrying the story along in its New Jersey setting from 1900 to World War I. He published an
Autobiography (1951),
Selected Letters (1957), and
Yes, Mrs. Williams (1960), a memoir of his mother. This material was increased by his correspondence with James Laughlin, his publisher, in 1989.
