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William Carlos Williams |
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In his life and work, William Carlos Williams was in many ways as complex and contradictory a figure as his name would suggest. This quintessentially American writer was born to a father of pure English stock and a mother of mixed French, Spanish, and Jewish heritage, neither of whom was originally from the United States. After seeing the girl he wanted to marry become engaged to his brother, Williams impulsively proposed to her sister, an action that became the basis for a marriage that would last until his death more than fifty years later. He wrote and published an enormous amount of poetry and critical prose, several books of short stories, a number of plays, and four novels, all while pursuing a full-time practice as a medical doctor. A relentless poetic theorist and technical experimenter, he produced a body of poetry rooted in the details of his own life and the lives of those around him in the New Jersey community that was his lifelong home. And he endured decades of ridicule and neglect as he published book after book in small editions with marginal publishers, finally to become enshrined as a modern master with a profound influence upon several generations of American poets.
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. He was the first of two sons of William George Williams and Raquel Helène Rose (Hoheb) Williams, known as Elena. His father, an Englishman who had been raised as an Episcopalian, worked as a businessman in New York City. His mother, who would live to be 93 years old, was born in Puerto Rico of half-Basque, half-Jewish ancestry and baptized a Catholic. As a young woman, she had studied art in Paris, and was later described by her son as a "defeated romantic." The couple joined the Unitarian Church in Rutherford. When William Carlos Williams was fourteen, his family went to live in Europe for two years, and he attended schools in Geneva, Switzerland, and in Paris. When they returned to the United States, he enrolled at Horace Mann High School in New York City, where he ran track. In 1901, he became ill after a race and was diagnosed with a heart murmur. Forced to drop athletics, he began to read seriously for the first time in his life, and also began to write poetry.
He determined to follow the same profession as his mother's brother, Carlos Hoheb, a doctor in Panama City, Panama, and after graduating from high school in 1902, he passed a rigorous entrance examination and was admitted directly into the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Two of his fellow students were Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), fellow poets with whom he would maintain lifelong--although, in Pound's case, often strained--friendships. Williams graduated in 1906 and proceeded to intern in New York City. In 1909, after becoming secretly engaged to eighteen-year-old Florence Herman, the "Flossie" of many of his poems, he went to Leipzig, Germany, to pursue graduate study in pediatrics. In Europe, he renewed his acquaintance with the expatriate Pound, through whom he met a number of literary figures, including William Butler Yeats. Upon his return, he established a practice in obstetrics and pediatrics in his home town of Rutherford. He and Florence were married on December 12, 1912, and in the next several years became the parents of two sons, William Eric and Paul.
Williams' first book, entitled simply Poems, was a twenty-two-page pamphlet printed in 1909 at his own expense. It was priced at twenty-five cents and sold, as Williams later recalled, about four copies. Its poems, on high-minded, abstract themes and replete with archaisms and inversions, were immature imitations of Keats, the poet Williams was most taken with at the time. He later rejected the little volume with such vehemence that the editors of the recent two-volume complete collection of his poetry have respected his stated wishes and not reprinted it. In 1913 came The Tempers, published in London through the efforts of Ezra Pound. There was still some post-Romantic residue in this collection, and some of the poems still rhymed, but overall the volume represented a step in his evolution into a modern poet, an evolution undertaken partly through his own instincts and partly through the influence of Pound and other writers of the modernist movement to whose work he was introduced by Pound.
As Williams would recall more than forty years later, in the delightful oral memoir I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, "Very early I began to question whether to rhyme and decided: No... I found I couldn't say what I had to say in rhyme. It got in my way. With Whitman, I decided rhyme belonged to another age; it didn't matter; it was not important at all... I began to begin lines with lower-case letters. I thought it pretentious to begin every line with a capital letter... When I came to the end of a rhythmic unit (not necessarily a sentence) I ended the line... I was trying for something. The rhythmic unit usually came to me in a lyrical outburst. I wanted it to look that way on the page. I didn't go in for long lines because of my nervous nature. I couldn't. The rhythmic pace was the pace of speech, an excited pace because I was excited when I wrote. I was discovering, pressed by some violent mood. The lines were short, not studied. Very frequently the first draft was the final draft by the time I reached the third book, Al Que Quiere!"
Although Williams would restlessly experiment with the shape and structure of his poems until the very end of his career, the basic tendencies of his work as he describes them in the above passage would remain constant. In those early poems, he was influenced by the Imagist emphasis of the period, as articulated by Pound and exemplified by H.D. Imagism stressed clarity, compression, and precision, with direct treatment of the subject (the principal means of communication was to be the image, not overt statement) and rhythms that were musical, not mechanical. Although it would leave permanent effects on his poetic thought and practice, as seen in his famous phrase "No ideas but in things," after a time he began to find Imagism in its pure form too limiting, unable to accommodate the kinds of social and psychological reality that he wished to incorporate into his work. For all his experimentalism, his driving impulse was the creation of a poetry that would speak about the lives of real people and speak to them in their own language. Consequently, he was appalled by Eliot's The Waste Land and by its extraordinary influence on critics and on other poets, feeling that Eliot, with his allusions and his obscurity, had returned poetry to the classroom just when it was on the point of being liberated into the real world.
In addition to his many volumes of poetry, Williams was also a prolific writer of fiction, especially in the 1930s. During that decade, he published two collections of short stories, centered, like many of his poems of the time, on the lives of his working-class neighbors and patients as they coped with the Depression, and two novels, the first volumes of a trilogy drawn from his wife's family and her own early life. The first of these novels, White Mule (1937), is notable for its detailed and charming presentation of a baby (based on Flossie herself) as one of its central characters.
Between 1946 and 1958, Williams published the five installments of Paterson, a book-length poem, which some would call, in the modern definition of the term, an epic. Fragments of an uncompleted sixth section were added when the poem was published in one volume after Williams' death. It is a sprawling commentary that incorporates autobiography, social comment, aesthetic theorizing, and even, in its later sections, the actual texts of letters written to Williams. Some critics perceive it as his masterwork, the culmination of all that he was seeking to accomplish, while others see it as a misstep, a betrayal of his true lyric achievement out of an insecure impulse to write an "important" (meaning long and obscure) work like Pound's Cantos or even the reviled Waste Land.
His unlimited energy and curiosity were demonstrated not only in his own work but in his frequent correspondence with and encouragement of younger poets, most notably Allen Ginsberg, for whose first book, Howl and Other Poems (1956), Williams wrote an introduction. For decades, virtually every new small literary magazine, particularly those of experimental tendencies, contained a contribution from Williams in its premier issue. Sadly, the one major public honor that came to him, in a life selflessly devoted to the cause of American literature, was spoiled by controversy. In 1949, he was appointed to the Chair of Poetry at the Library of Congress, but accusations arose regarding his presumed left-leaning politics and, contrarily, his friendship with Ezra Pound, who was then in a Federal mental hospital, under charge of treason for having made pro-Fascist broadcasts from Italy during the Second World War. Before Williams could assume his duties, the appointment was withdrawn, and the whole episode upset him deeply.
In March 1951, Williams suffered the first of a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. His ill health ultimately forced him to retire from medicine, turning over his practice to his son William, but at first it brought no diminution in either his appearances at literary gatherings or his voluminous writing. Poetically, his last decade was one of his richest. Not only did he remain as prolific as ever, but the poems of this period, particularly those collected in The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), possessed a wisdom and serenity that brought a richer and deeper note to his work and won him many new readers. Pictures from Brueghel (1962) brought him in the following year his first and only Pulitzer Prize--which, perhaps typically, he was never able to enjoy, having died on March 4, 1963.
Like anyone who publishes as much as he did, Williams was an uneven writer. A proper assessment of his achievement is further complicated by his copious musings on poetry and aesthetics. As a critic he was never a systematic thinker, and his impulsive and not always clear theorizing sometimes muddies his intent instead of clarifying it. Nonetheless, his reputation has continued to grow, to the point where he is probably more of an influence on contemporary poetic practice than any of the other modern masters. It is undeniable that much of this influence has been negative, leading to verse that is slack and/or incoherent, but he is hardly to be held accountable for the excesses of others carried out in his name. At his best, Williams produced some of the sharpest and most vivid poems of the century, poems that achieved his goal of being written from, and speaking to, the real lives of real Americans.
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