william carlos williams selected essays

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician, wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Will William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician, wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New.
William Carlos Williams passport photograph,1921 William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Contents 1 Life and career 2 Poetry 3 Legacy, awards and honors 4 Bibliography 4.1 Poetry collections 4.2 Books, prose 4.3 Drama 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links 8.1 Profiles 8.2 Archive and works Life and career[edit] Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son, Williams's father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. Williams received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He attended the Horace Mann School upon his return to New York City and, having passed a special examination, was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906.[1][2] Upon leaving University of Pennsylvania, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York before going to Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics.[1] He published his first book, Poems, in 1909. Williams married Florence Herman (1891–1976) in 1912, after he returned from Germany.[1] They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Shortly afterward, his second book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound, whom he met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1914, Williams had his first son, William E. Williams, followed by his second son, Paul H. Williams, in 1917.[3] His.
William Carlos Williams was committed to the creation of a distinct American style of poetry, and over the course of his career his work became increasingly focused on an innovative approach to structure and measure. These two elements are the focus of his essay “The Poem as a Field of Action,” which was presented as a lecture at the University of Washington in 1948. Williams refers to the subject matter of a poem as its materials, and borrows from Freud to call the poem, like the dream, a space for wish fulfillment. Subject matter is seen as fantasy, while the reality of the poem is its measure. Williams sees “a wish for aristocratic attainment” as the preferred subject of poetry until the Industrial Revolution, under whose spirit “it began to be noticed that there could be a new subject matter and that that was not in fact the poem at all.” Even though poets opened the imagery of their work to include the industrial landscapes and other new subjects, Williams argues, the poet’s use of measure has not undergone the same revolutionary change. Applying Einstein’s theory of relativity to the “relativity of measurements,” Williams argues that “our poems are not subtly enough made, the structure, the staid manner of the poem cannot let our feelings through.” Citing “the rigidity of the poetic foot” as a significant obstacle to contemporary poetry, Williams proposes that his American peers instead turn to speech as a new form of measure, and particularly contemporary, shifting American dialects, in order to “listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make.” Williams discusses the work of Eliot and Auden as falling outside of this proposed structural revolution in poetry. Williams sees Proust, on the other hand, as being the first to successfully bridge the innovations of literary style and natural science. Spring and All (1923), composed more than twenty years.
William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects, Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: There is no optimistic blindness in Williams, wrote Randall Jarrell, though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness. Born the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry, Williams grew up in Rutherford, where his family provided him with a fertile background in art and literature. His father's mother, coincidentally named Emily Dickinson, was a lover of theatre, and his own mother painted. Williams's father introduced his favorite author, Shakespeare, to his sons and read Dante and the Bible to them as well; but Williams had other interests in study. His enthusiastic pursuit of math and science at New York City's Horace Mann High School showed how little writing entered into any of my calculations. Later in high school, though, Williams took an interest in languages and felt for the first time the excitement of great books. He recalled his first poem, also written during that time, giving him a feeling of joy. Aside from an emerging writing consciousness, Williams's early life was sweet and sour, reported Reed Whittemore; Williams himself wrote that terror dominated my youth, not fear. Part of this terror, speculated James.
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