William Carlos Williams Biography

Authors and Artists for Young Adults on William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in twentieth-century 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' poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell in Poetry and the Age, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, John Xiros Cooper found that "Williams's poetics are uniquely physical. For him reality, perception, and language are materially based, and the knowledge derived from the contact of mind and earth, language and the real, leads to the same sort of awareness that comes from touching and handling, from caressing and probing and cupping the intimately known and loved." John Malcolm Brinnin noted in American Writers: "Williams built his career on opposition--opposition to every form of poetry that depends on meter or rhyme or any other device that, to his mind, served only to falsify the experience it would transcribe--opposition to every kind of thinking that orders itself in generalities rather than submits to the hazards of unwieldy particulars." Linda W.

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