William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) famously combined the two

careers of doctor and writer, along the way founding a specifically

American version of Modernism. He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey,
the son of a New York businessman of British extraction and a Puerto
Rican mother with artistic talent. He grew up speaking Spanish and
French as well as English, from the start in tune with America's
multiracial and immigrant traditions. He studied medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania where he made important friendships with
Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). He graduated in 1906 and, after
further medical study in pediatrics, set up his own practice in
Rutherford in 1910 treating his patients diligently for the next forty one
years. Though he made several important trips to Europe, Williams' life
was essentially rooted in what he termed "the local". In 1912 he married
Florence Herman and they moved into a house in Rutherford which was
home to them and their two sons for many years. Williams' early poems,
begun in college, are Keatsian and derivative but he swiftly abandoned
this style and, under the influence of Pound, embraced Imagism and its
emphasis on clear visual detail and the exact word. Local he might have
been, but Williams was never provincial: his friendship with Pound kept
him in touch with movements in the international avant garde and he
also became part of a radical group of artists and writers in New York
known as 'The Others' that included Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Wallace
Stevens and Marianne Moore. What set Williams apart from other
members of the modernist movement was his determination to create
poetry out of a specifically American idiom, informed by the rhythms of
everyday speech. This urge to forge a democratic aesthetic was at odds
with the reliance of poets like Pound and T. S. Eliot on classical and
European traditions. Whilst Williams' output was huge - including short
stories, novels, plays and essays - this ambition remained a driving force.
It was informed too by a political engagement - he described himself as a
socialist - shaped by his daily contact with the largely working class
patients he saw in his surgery.

A significant breakthrough in Williams' methods came with the montage
of prose and poetry, grounded in colloquialisms, of Spring and
All (1923). His quest for a truly native form of poetry made him a
restless experimenter, particularly as regards metre and lineation.
Abandoning traditional forms, Williams explored more flexible rhythms,
including a radical use of enjambment, (the continuation from one line
to another of a single unit of sense), which forces the reader to
encounter, and therefore re-evaluate, such simple objects as
wheelbarrows and plums. From the 1950s he developed a three-stepped
or 'triadic' line and his concept of the "variable foot" which gives his
later work a strong visual dimension, almost like that of an abstract
painting.

Although Williams was admired in literary circles in the 1920s and
1930s he had to wait until 1937 for a reliable publisher when the
fledgling New Directions made him one of their key authors. However,
from then on his example became increasingly influential: writers as
diverse as Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg turned to him for poetic
inspiration and he paved the way for many of the movements of the
1950s including the Black Mountain Poets, the New York, School, the
Beats and the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1940s he embarked on
his five-volume epic of small-town life,Paterson, the culmination of his
belief in the essentially poetic nature of dailiness. Critical appreciation
began to catch up with his achievements when the third volume
of Paterson (1949) won the National Book Award. However, the decade
also brought difficulties: he suffered the first of many strokes in 1951
which forced him to give up medicine and then his position as consultant
to the Library of Congress was revoked during the McCarthy anti-
communist hysteria, an event that triggered a spell in hospital for
depression. He continued to suffer a series of debilitating strokes and
died in 1963. His last published collection,Pictures from Breughel and
Other Poems, was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

His Archive poems date from his major
poetic flowering from the mid 1920s-
mid 1940s, apart from 'Postlude'
which is from 1913 and forms an
interesting contrast to the poems of
Williams' mature style. It's a piece that
looks forward and backwards in its
combination of the kind of poeticized
diction that Williams was soon to
abandon with a modern sensibility in
its ironic take on a love affair past its
sell-by date. It's interesting to compare
it with 'Queen Anne's Lace', a later
poem which is also highly romantic,
drawing on the traditional comparison
between women and flowers, but
which is entirely different in manner
and effect: instead of the classical
allusiveness of 'Postlude', the poem's
central metaphor is a commonplace
field. The poem makes this shift in
emphasis explicit: the woman is not
like the decorous remoteness of a
white anemone, but rather has the
vigour of "a field/ of the wild carrot/
taking the field by force".

The recording also features one of the
defining poems of the 20th century:
the brevity of 'The Red Wheelbarrow' -
just sixteen words in all - belies its
iconic fame. However, it is the
archetypal example of Williams' oft-
quoted maxim "no ideas but in things",
the extreme simplicity of the language
and the precise placing of each visual
element an argument for clear sight in
poetry, stripped of conventional
symbolism. Elsewhere Williams' social
conscience is to the fore, in the act of
imaginative empathy of 'The Widow's
Lament in Springtime' and the more
overtly political vision of 'The Yachts'
and 'To Elsie'. The former is radical in
a different way from the experimental
minimalism of 'The Red Wheelbarrow'
as it presents an image of capitalist
oppression: Williams captures the
exhilaration of the yachts' triumphant
progress, but he also sees the
ruthlessness of privilege which they
represent. 'To Elsie', its twenty two
stanzas poured out in a single
sentence, constructs a powerful
critique of a modern world in which
the lower classes are degraded by lust
and exploited by the better off. The
final poem, 'The Dance', celebrates
movement and Williams' great love of
art. Here he does use a traditional
metre, the dactyl (one stressed syllable
followed by two unstressed) which
gives the poem a powerful forward
momentum. The whirling energy of the
peasants is also intensified through the
enjambment of each line which doesn't
allow a pause for breath. It feels
especially important to be able to
listen to this great celebrant of
American speech, his light clear voice
relishing the different kinds of music
created by each poem.

His recording was made on 5 May 1945
at the Recording Laboratory, Library of
Congress, Washington, D.C. and is used
by kind permission of the Libarary of
Congress.
Williams' jams of enjambments and free verse
Williams' use of imagery encourages attentiveness to
imagination. In "The Yachts," he incites the creation of images
in the mind, within a chaotic maelstrom of misery, "It is a sea of
faces about them in agony, in despair until the horror of the
race dawns staggering the mind;/the whole sea becomes an
entanglement of watery bodies '' (27-29) "The Yachts lacks
the traditional meter, but still conveys a sense of rhythm. The
rhythm is subtle, yet influential; it exists but is essentially
invisible to the reader. The dynamic visual and auditory rhythm
in the poem parallels the power of its imagery. Williams
succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary
through the clarity and directness of imagery through slight
rhythm and form.
" Broken/beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be
taken up/they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising/in waves
skill as the skillful yachts pass over. (30-33) It is with Williams'
use of massive enjambments and lack of punctuation that
allows the reader to become enraptured in a world of conf
In The Yachts, Williamss more typical penchant for imagistic
presentation coexists with a tendency toward symbolism.
Halfway through the poem, there is an interesting and unusual
shift from an imagistic to a symbolic mode. The occasion is a
yacht race in a bay protected from the too-heavy blows/ of an
ungoverned ocean.
During the preparations for the race, the speaker is impressed
by the physical beauty of the graceful craft, Mothlike in mists,
scintillant in the minute/ brilliance of cloudless days, with broad
bellying sails. Although the appeal is primarily imagistic, there
is a metaphoric suggestion in the observation that the yachts,
surrounded by more clumsy sycophant craft,
appear youthful, rareas the light of a happy eye, live with the
graceof all that in the mind is feckless, free andnaturally to be
desired.
As the race begins, however, after a delaying lull, the scene
changes ominously. The waves of the roughening water now
seem to be human bodies overridden and cut down by the
sharp bows of the yachts: It is a sea of faces about them in
agony, in despair/ until the horror of the race dawns staggering
the mind. The original appeal of the beautiful spectacle of
pleasure boats is broken and then displaced by the revelation
of deeper meaning. The...
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