William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams

• A physician by training, Williams wrote poems
  about everyday subjects and the lives of ordinary
  people, using clear, concrete language.

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William Carlos Williams

• He avoided artificiality and sentimentality in
  his work by producing clear, direct verse about
  common, everyday subjects.
• He is known for his innovative language and
  precise detail, as well as attention to line
  breaks.
• Initially acclaimed for his poetry, Williams
  eventually also won acceptance as a writer of
  prose.

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William Carlos Williams

• Unlike some other writers of his time, such as T.
  S. Eliot, Williams avoided complexity and obscure
  symbolism.
• Instead, he produced lyrics, such as this one
  from January Morning (1938), that contain few
  difficult references All this/ was for you,
  old woman./ I wanted to write a poem/ that you
  would understand.
• Williamss greatest achievement as a writer was
  the epic Paterson (5 volumes, 1946-1958), which
  is a landmark of 20th-century poetry.

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A Brueghel Nativity
A Brueghel Nativity was published in the
magazine The Nation in 1958 and became part of
the collection Paterson, Books I-V (1946-1958),
named after Paterson, New Jersey, where Williams
practiced medicine.
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Peter Brueghel, the elder, painted a Nativity,
painted a Baby new born! among the words.
Armed men. savagely armed men
armed with pikes, halberds and
swords whispering men with averted faces, get to
the heart of the matter as they
talked to the pot bellied greybeard (center) the
butt of their comments, looking askance, showing
their amazement at the scene, features like the
more stupid German soldiers of the late war
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but the Baby (as from an illustrated
catalogue in colors) lies naked on his
Mother's knees it is a scene, authentic enough,
to be witnessed frequently among the poor (I
salute the man Brueghel who painted what he saw
many times no doubt among his own kids
but not of course in this setting)
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The crowned and mitred heads of the three men,
one of them black, who had come, obviously from
afar (highwaymen?) by the rich robes they had
onoffered to propitiate their gods Their hands
were loaded with gifts they had eyes for
visions in those daysand saw, saw with their
proper eyes, these things to the envy of the
vulgar soldiery
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He painted the bustle of the scene, the unkempt
straggling hair of the old man in the middle, his
sagging lips incredulous that there was so
much fuss about such a simple thing as a
baby born to an old man out of a girl and a
pretty girl at that
But the gifts! (works of art, where could they
have picked them up or more properly have stolen
them?) how else to honor an old man or a woman?
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the soldiers' ragged clothes, mouths open, their
knees and feet broken from thirty years of war,
hard campaigns, their mouths watering for the
feast which had been provided Peter Brueghel
the artist saw it from the two sides
the imagination must be served and he served
dispassionately. Source Williams,
William Carlos. A Brueghel Nativity. The
Nation, May 31, 1958.
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Life and Works

• Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey.
• His father, William George Williams, was from
  Britain, and his mother, Helene Raquel Williams,
  was a Puerto Rican-born woman of Basque and
  French descent.
• Williams grew up in a household that spoke
  French, Spanish, and British English.
• He entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical
  School in 1902, and while there formed
  friendships with several poets who would go on to
  great fame Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda
  Doolittle.
• After an internship in New York City, Williams
  studied pediatrics at the University of Leipzig
  in Germany.
• By late 1912, Williams had returned to
  Rutherford, set up a private practice, and
  married his fiancée of several years, Florence
  Hermann.

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Life and Works

• Although he developed a busy practice as a
  doctor, Williams also was a prolific writer, and
  for much of his life he published a book at least
  every two years.
• His most important prose works are The Great
  American Novel (1923) In the American Grain
  (1925), a collection of essays on figures from
  American history and White Mule (1938), the
  first novel in a three-book series following the
  life of one family.

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Life and Works

• In addition to Paterson, Williamss various
  poetry collections include The Collected Early
  Poems (1938), The Collected Later Poems (1950),
  and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
  (1962), which is a collection of works written
  from 1950 to 1962.

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Life and Works

• Williams began to achieve public recognition for
  his writing in 1950, when he won the National
  Book Award in poetry for the third volume of
  Paterson.
• Three years later he won the Bollingen
  Prizeawarded by Yale University for achievement
  in American poetryand in 1963, after his death,
  Williams won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for
  Pictures from Brueghel.

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Poetic Ideas

• Poetry was, for Williams, a crucial and
  necessaryyet sometimes ignoredmeans of
  communicating.
• In Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955), he
  wrote, "It is difficult/ to get the news from
  poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/
  of what is found there."

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Poetic Ideas

• Williams's ideas were basically humanistic
  respect yourself and others, love those you can,
  and try to make the world a better place.
• He tried to live up to these ideals through both
  his writing and his medical practice.

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Poetic Ideas

• One quality that Williams admired greatly was
  persistence
• He loved old people who kept their vigorous
  response to life, just as he admired artists who
  kept improving and perfecting their work.

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Poetic Ideas

• Williamss straightforward approach to writing
  marked a new direction for poetry.
• In shaping his idea of what this new poetry
  should be, Williams emphasized four qualities.
• The first was the use of commonplace subjects and
  themes.
• The poet must write about things people can
  respond to, things people have seen and know.
• Otherwise, literature stands separate from its
  readers.

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Poetic Ideas

• The second principle for the new poetry was the
  poets duty to write about real events or objects
  in a language that all people could understand,
  with an ear for the way people actually speak.

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Poetic Ideas

• Williams called his language "the American idiom"
  and stressed repeatedly that it was different
  from formal English in that it allowed for speech
  patterns that could violate grammatical rules.
• He delighted in experimenting with short poems
  that were little more than fragments of speech
  capturing individual moments, thoughts, feelings,
  or images, as in "This Is Just To Say" (1934) I
  have eaten/ the plums/ that were/ in the
  icebox...

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Poetic Ideas

• The third attribute for the new poetry was
  specificity.
• Williams objected to traditional poetry that
  talked in generalities, such as poems that
  treated love, death, anger, and friendship as
  abstractions rather than as real things.

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Poetic Ideas

• Fighting against what he called aboutness,
  Williams coined the phrase "No ideas but in
  things."
• This meant that his poetry made its point by
  focusing attention on concrete reality.
• To show an emotion such as love, he would write
  about the everyday gestures that represented the
  emotion, such as a heartfelt apology.
• Also, Williams paid attention to simple objects,
  like red wheelbarrows, that other poets ignored,
  and he found poetic qualities in these everyday
  objects.

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• The Red Wheelbarrow 1926
• This is Just to Say 1927
• The Dance