After graduating from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, William Carlos Williams had a serious medical career in pediatrics, setting up private practice in his native town of Rutherford, New Jersey. Eventually he became head pediatrician of the General Hospital in Paterson. But Williams soon discovered his potential as a writer, and played an active role in the avant-garde poetic movements of New York City and Europe. He published his first literary work, 'Poems,' in 1909. Williams became known for his realistic portrayals of women and revulsion against fascism, as well as his desire to create a specifically American poetry based on the rhythms and colorations of American speech, thought, and experience. He wrote stories, plays and prose. His 'Autobiography' , devoted to both the medical and poetic aspects of his life, drew heavily on his experience with his working-class patients, especially the women, whose babies he delivered and whose hardy courage he admired. Williams expressed the nation's character, especially its urban volatility: its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behavior, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history. His sequence of poems 'Paterson,' dedicated to his downtrodden hometown, was published serially between 1946 and 1961. It was a search for the elements of a 'common language': a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society. "No ideas but in things," he wrote on the first page. Williams gradually emerged as one of the great forces in twentieth-century verse. His striking experiments are expressive of American sensibility, saturated with speech and its rhythms, drawing comparisons to Whitman. The Beat poets showed strong traces of his influence. He died in 1963, the same year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
He was elected into the 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame for his services and contributions to Literature.
Pictured on one of ten USA nondenominated commemorative postage stamps celebrating "20th Century Poets", issued as a pane of 20 stamps on 21 April 2012. Other stamps in this issued honored Joseph Brodsky , Gwendolyn Brooks , e.e. cummings , Sylvia Plath , Wallace Stevens , Elizabeth Bishop , Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and Theodore Roethke. The price of each stamp on day of issue was 45.
We sit and talk,quietly, with long lapses of silenceand I am aware of the streamthat has no language, coursingbeneath the quiet heaven ofyour eyeswhich has no speech,You lethargic, waiting upon me,waiting for the fire and Iattendant upon you, shaken by your beautyShaken by your beauty Shaken.
Your thighs are appletrees. Your knees are a southern breeze.
so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.
beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
The business of love is cruelty which,by our wills, we transform to live together.
Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?,For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
What power has love but forgiveness?In other wordsby its interventionwhat has been donecan be undone. What good is it otherwise?,Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
A man is indeed a city, and for the poet there are no ideas but in things.
The HurricaneThe tree lay downon the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.
Hold back the edges of your gown, Ladies, we are going through hell.
There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else. Porpoises risen in a green sea, the wind at nightfall bending the rose- red grasses and you- in your apron hurrying to catch- say it seems to you to be your son. How ridiculous! You will pass up into a cloud and look back at me, not count the scribbling foolish that put wings at your heels, at your knees.
Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.
unsignificantlyoff the coastthere wasa splash quite unnoticedthis was Icarus drowning,What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
Time is a storm in which we are all lost. .
