A much admired homebody whose verse captures humanistic truths, William Carlos Williams managed a forty-one-year career in medicine alongside a considerable contribution to modern literature. His background as a jazz disciple allied him with poets Hart Crane, Jean Toomer, Wallace Stevens, and e. e. cummings, all proponents of variable meter. Unlike the more flamboyant, Europeanized literary experimenters of the age, he remained tethered to small-town American life. Rebelling against the nihilism and academic elitism of modern art, the substance of his work returned poetry to the common citizen.
Born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford Park, New Jersey, Williams was a first-generation American. His studies at the Château de Lançy in Geneva and the Lycée Condorcet in Paris did little to alter his New World identity. In his late teens, he discovered the works of Walt Whitman and John Keats and began imitating their style. Because of rigid upbringing, he established the stable career that his parents expected and relegated writing to off-hours relaxation as a form of mental and spiritual liberation.
Williams entered professional studies at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, where he met fellow students Ezra Pound and H. D. From them, he acquired a delight in the unfettered creativity of free verse. After switching from dentistry and obtaining an M.D. in 1906, Williams interned in New York City slums at the French Hospital and the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. He completed an advanced degree in pediatrics from the University of Leipzig and settled into practice. He married Florence “Flossie” Herman, with whom he had two sons, William and Paul.
Williams operated a medical practice in his Rutherford home from 1910 to 1952 and delivered some 2,000 infants, while maintaining a second-floor studio for his writing. From lines scribbled on prescription pads and typed while he rested between patients, he submitted polished human-centered verse to magazines and journals. He published his first stand-alone volume in 1909 as Poems, an unremarkable start privately printed at a cost of $50. The Tempers (1913) was the first of many verse collections grounded in the vital vernacular of ordinary folk.
Williams maintained a slow, steady evolution into a significant spokesman for localism and the American idiom. Like Frost, he began to focus on everyday figures and objects. He developed mythic and classic allusions without straying from a workaday intent. In Transitional (1915), he moved into free verse, a venue that suited his contemporary flow of Al Que Quiere! [To Him Who Seeks] (1917), Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), and In the American Grain (1925), the culmination of his intense study of national themes and attitudes. He followed with Collected Poems (1934), An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935), Adam & Eve & the City (1936), Complete Collected Poems (1938), The Broken Span (1941), and Journey to Love (1956), but published nothing that elevated his literary reputation among average readers. Angered by the success of more erudite poets, he founded alternative magazines to provide a voice for populist poems. In addition to writing verse, he translated the work of Philippe Soupault and published four novels, three collections of short fiction, four anthologies of essays, a libretto, a play, a volume of letters, and an autobiography. At the height of his artistry, he composed a personal epic, Paterson, published in four installments from 1946 to 1951. In 1963, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948; in 1951, he transferred his practice to his son. In 1952, during the McCarthy era, Williams served only a few months as national poetry consultant, an appointment marred by accusations that his poem “Russia” was pro-Communist. Public humiliation and the failure of the literary community to support him precipitated a stroke, followed by diminished sight. He died at home in his sleep on March 4, 1963, and he was buried at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
Williams, the maverick genius, is remembered for mentoring poets Allen Ginsberg and Kay Boyle and for influencing Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, and Denise Levertov. A posthumous collection, The William Carlos Williams Reader, was issued in 1966; a fiction anthology, William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Stories, appeared in 1984. Libraries at the University of Buffalo and Yale house his personal papers.
