William Carlos Williams Letters

Background on William Carlos Williams

The son of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother, William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. in 1883, where he later spent more than forty years serving the city as an obstetrician and the chief of pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. Although he had a long and successful career as a physician, Williams is best known as a key figure in American poetry, closely associated with modernism and imagism. He devoted his life to developing a distinctly American verse by using colloquial American English, pushing against the "speech of the English country people, which would have something artificial about it."

With the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922, Williams distinguished himself from his contemporaries by developing his own distinctive brand of modernism, simpler, on the surface, than the complex and highly allusive mainstream of Eliot or Ezra Pound. From the 1950s onward, however, Williams' aesthetic became increasingly influential within academic circles. He served as a mentor to many young poets and was influential in several literary movements, including the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York school.

After surviving a heart attack in 1948, Williams was beset with heart troubles and strokes for years. Despite failing health, he continued to travel and lecture until he passed away in his sleep in March 1963.