WILLIAMS, William Carlos

(b. 17 September 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey; d. 4 March 1963 in Rutherford, New Jersey), author and physician whose lifelong commitment to poetic innovation and the creation of a uniquely American form had a major influence on the direction of poetry in the 1960s, at which time he began to be acknowledged as one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century.

Williams, whose poetry candidly represented the multiculturalism of America, came from a richly diverse background. His father, William George Williams, was a New York businessman, born in Britain, who grew up in Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands. His mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb, was from Puerto Rico and of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry. Williams and his younger brother, Edgar, were raised speaking Spanish and French as well as English. He attended school in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent to Switzerland and Paris to study until 1899. He graduated from Horace Mann High School inNew York City in 1902. Williams attended the University of Pennsylvania Medical School from 1902 to 1906. There he received his M.D. and also developed crucial friendships with poets Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and painter Charles Demuth. Williams studied medicine, but his heart was equally devoted to literature. He published his first collection, Poems, in 1909.

After completing internships at hospitals in New York and an advanced study of pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany, Williams returned to Rutherford in 1910 and opened the practice where he treated local, working-class patients for the rest of his career. On 12 December 1912 he married Florence "Flossie" Herman; they had two sons. The Williams family settled into the house at 9 Ridge Road (now an official state monument) where they remained, and where Williams practiced medicine, for the rest of their lives. Williams developed his own unique brand of American modernism, writing poetry, fiction, essays, plays, and sketches whose true importance would only achieve recognition near the end of his life.

By the 1960s Williams had reached the end of his career. A series of debilitating strokes and other medical problems from the preceding decade left him with the use of only one hand, unable to read, and limited speech and mobility. He retired from medical practice in March 1951, after his first stroke, but continued to write until his death. While Williams's health in the 1960s was in rapid decline, he nonetheless became a vital influence on the writers and writing of the decade.

Williams's particular contribution to contemporary poetry was the creation of a form that reflected the actual speech and experience of the people around him. His lifelong goal was to create, as Walt Whitman had done, a democratic poetry "in the American grain" (the title of Williams's collection of historical essays on great American figures). While Whitman developed a language of prophetic expansiveness, with a long verse line to match, Williams's poems were simple, spare, and restrained, frequently composed of very short, two-or three-line haiku-like stanzas. His most famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow," is a classic example:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

Williams's poetry abstains both from the drama of Whitman and from the intellectualizing of contemporary high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and instead abides by a principle of "objectivism" in which local things are treated with close attention and quiet respect. This poetic dictum is set forth with typical lucidity in Paterson, Williams's important, five-book poem of the American experience: "no ideas but in things."

While Williams was committed to forging a native tradition, he was far from provincial. Part of his attraction for writers of the 1960s was not only the homegrown values he promoted but also his ability to move between the worlds of the local and the international, the populist and the avant-garde. While he lived a humble rural life and focused his poetry on the local scene, he also remained constantly in touch with the latest developments in art in New York City and Europe. Like colleagues such as Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, Williams was committed to the contemporary visual arts, and his writing was influenced by movements such as cubism and by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse. Williams's interest in the visual arts as an important complement to poetry was renewed in the 1960s by poets such as John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Barbara Guest of the so-called New York School of poets.

Williams was virtually ignored for most of his life in favor of supposedly more sophisticated writers such as T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land Williams called "the great catastrophe … which gave the poem back to the academics." By the 1960s, however, many young writers who also reacted strongly against the politics and impersonality of Pound and Eliot began looking to Williams as a poetic, intellectual, and moral role model. One poet who turned to Williams for advice and encouragement was another New Jersey native named Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg and Williams corresponded for years, and Williams eventually wrote a laudatory introduction for Ginsberg's groundbreaking book Howl (1956)—which became something of a 1960s poetic manifesto. This led to more contact with Beat writers and a famous visit by Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Peter Orlovsky to Williams's home. "Doc" Williams's influence and "paternity" extended far beyond the Beat writers, however, and throughout the last decades of his career he kept up correspondences, offering friendship and advice to other such important American writers as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, and Robert Lowell, as well as Canadian poets such as Irving Layton and British poets such as Charles Tomlinson.

Williams continued to write throughout his last years, though his work slowed dramatically. His last poetry collection, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry posthumously in 1963. During his final years he edited and organized earlier unpublished work, including Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (1959); his collected short stories, The Farmers' Daughters (1961); and his collected plays, Many Loves and Other Plays (1961). Though his mobility was limited, he was able to attend productions of two of his plays in New York City, Many Loves (1959) and A Dream of Love (1961). He also kept up correspondence with, and received occasional visits from, many of his artistic contemporaries and younger protégés. Williams died peacefully at home in Rutherford and was buried at the local Hillside Cemetery.

Williams's importance to the poetry of the 1960s cannot be underestimated. His work helped provoke a major reassessment of what counted as appropriate poetic form, diction, and content. While Pound and Eliot succeeded in internationalizing American literature, many writers felt they did so at the expense of the American experience. Williams, on the other hand, created an American form of international standard. The outward simplicity of his work meant that it went unnoticed for many years. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s, when the values it tacitly promoted—casual openness, frankness, an honest appreciation for the here and now through close attention to its details—became the key values of the era, that his full achievement began to be appreciated.

The majority of Williams's manuscripts and letters are held by three libraries: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo; and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Library, University of Texas at Austin. Williams's Autobiography (1951) deals with both his careers as doctor and poet and with the crucial relationship between the two. Reed Whittemore wrote the first biography, William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975). This was followed by Paul L. Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), a meticulously detailed eight-hundred-page biography. There are many important full-length critical studies of Williams's work, including James Breslin, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (1970); Joseph N. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams (1974); Stephen Tapscott, American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman (1984); and Peter Schmidt, William Carlos Williams, The Arts, and Literary Tradition (1988). Of particular interest for Williams's influence on postmodern poetry is John Lowney, The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory (1997). Bibliographical information can be found in Emily Mitchell Wallace, A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams (1968), and Linda W. Wagner, William Carlos Williams: A Reference Guide (1978).

Mark Silverberg