William Carlos Williams
(1883–1963)

A close friend of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams was an important member of the Imagist movement. Opposing Pound's belief in using allusions to maintain a link to the past, Williams focused on capturing the common, everyday images of his time in an effort to create poetry with relevance to the lives of ordinary people.

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he spent most of his life. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, he became a pediatrician–a doctor who specializes in the care of children. In 1909, he published his first volume of poetry and began pursuing a double career as a poet and a doctor. Williams felt that his experiences as a doctor helped him with inspiration as a poet, crediting medicine for his ability to "gain entrance to…the secret gardens of the self."

While Williams's first book was modeled after the work of English Romantic poets, he soon developed his own distinctive voice. This voice emerged with the publication of Spring and All (1913), a book of mixed prose and poetry. In Spring and All and In the American Grain (1925), Williams made it clear that his aim was to capture the essence of modern American life by depicting a variety of ordinary people, objects, and experiences using up-to-date, everyday language. He avoided presenting explanations or making generalizations, commenting that a poet should deal in "No ideas but in things." By this he meant that a poet should present concrete images that speak for themselves, evoking emotions and stimulating thoughts and ideas.

In 1948, Williams suffered a heart attack, and three years later he had the first of a series of strokes. He was forced to abandon his medical practice and writing became increasingly difficult. However, he still managed to produce Paterson (1946-1958), a five-part epic poem filled with observations about life in the city of Paterson, New Jersey, and two additional collections of poetry, The Desert Music (1954) and Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1962). In 1963, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures of Breughel.

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