BY COREY BRYAN
William Carlos Williams was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, Williams was raised in a middle-class family by his father, a hard-working pharmacist, and his mother, an aspiring writer. Williams attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he earned an M.D. in 1906, but he was determined to pursue a career in writing, and he continued to write throughout his medical practice.
His multi-cultural upbringing would play a big role in his life and remain a constant source of inspiration for his poems. His work as a physician brought in many different kinds of people and he absorbed so much cultural knowledge and influence.
Williams is best known for his work in the modernist movement, which sought to challenge the literary conventions of the past. His style was characterized by a focus on everyday life and the realities of American culture. “No ideas but in things” is his famous quote which explains that he sought to capture images, not analyze. He wrote in a free-verse style, often using natural imagery and descriptions of everyday life to create vivid and powerful images. He wrote with a directness and a simplicity that was at once both accessible and profound.
Williams wrote numerous poems, collections of short stories, novels, and plays, but it is his poems that are his most enduring legacy. His best-known works include The Red Wheelbarrow, The Great Figure, and This Is Just to Say. Many of his poems focus on the lives of working-class Americans, and themes of loneliness, love, and mortality are frequent throughout his writing.
Williams was a strong advocate for the use of modernist techniques in writing, and he was deeply influential in the development of the Imagist movement, which emphasized the use of precise image and language to evoke emotion and evoke a sense of place.
He was also a major influence on the Beat Poets of the 1950s and 60s. His emphasis on everyday language and experience was reflected in the work of the Beat Poets, who sought to capture the immediacy and intensity of life through poetry.
Without Williams’ influence, the Beat Poetry movement would have been much different. His work provided an important bridge between modernism, imagism and the Beat movement. His commitment to capturing the immediacy of life in his poems was also an inspiration to the Beat Poets, and his work served as a model for how to write about everyday experience. William Carlos Williams played an especially large role in Allen Ginsberg’s writing, even providing the introduction to Ginsberg’s seminal work ‘Howl and other poems’.
Although he was never awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his writing, Williams was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry in 1950, and he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1963.
Williams is remembered as a groundbreaking figure in modern American literature, and his work has been widely anthologized and studied. His influence on American literature is felt in many areas of poetry. He had his hand in many different poetic movement cookie jars, and they’re all the better for it.