William Carlos Williams
- Born:
- September 17, 1883, Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.
- Died:
- March 4, 1963, Rutherford (aged 79)
- Founder:
- “Contact”
- Awards And Honors:
- National Book Award
- Pulitzer Prize
- Bollingen Prize (1952)
William Carlos Williams (born September 17, 1883, Rutherford, New Jersey, U.S.—died March 4, 1963, Rutherford) was an American poet who succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary through the clarity and discreteness of his imagery. His signature poems include “The Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say.”
After receiving an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906 and after internship in New York and graduate study in pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany, he returned in 1910 to a lifetime of poetry and medical practice in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey.
In Al Que Quiere! (1917; “To Him Who Wants It!”) his style was distinctly his own. Characteristic poems that proffer Williams’s fresh, direct impression of the sensuous world are the frequently anthologized “Lighthearted William,” “By the Road to the Contagious Hospital,” and “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, his images became less a celebration of the world and more a catalog of its wrongs. Such poems as “Proletarian Portrait” and “The Yachts” reveal his skill in conveying attitudes by presentation rather than explanation.
In Paterson (5 volumes, 1946–58), Williams expressed the idea of the city, which in its complexity also represents man in his complexity. The poem is based on the industrial city in New Jersey on the Passaic River and evokes a complex vision of America and modern humanity.
A prolific writer of prose, Williams in the book In the American Grain (1925) analyzed the American character and culture through essays on historical figures such as Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, and Abraham Lincoln. Three novels form a trilogy about a family—White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). Among his notable short stories are “Jean Beicke,” “A Face of Stone,” and “The Farmers’ Daughters.” His play A Dream of Love (published 1948) was produced in Off-Broadway and academic theaters.
Williams’s Autobiography appeared in 1951. In 1952 he was named consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress, a position later known as U.S. poet laureate, but his poor health prevented him from serving; the appointment was later revoked, during an FBI investigation driven by anti-communist sentiment. In 1963 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (1962).
