William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

(Image Source: Time)

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. In 1906 he earned an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met the poet Ezra Pound and H.D. and the painter Charles Demuth. In 1910 he opened a pediatric practice in Rutherford, where, except for a year’s “sabbatical” in Europe, he lived and practice medicine for the rest of his life. Although strongly established in Rutherford, Williams was hardly provincial. He moved in New York’s avant-grade circles- along with the poets Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens and the artist Marcel Duchamp- and was affiliated with several short-lived but influential journals. In addition to poetry, he wrote fiction, drama, and essays. Influenced by Pound, Williams was an early proponent of imagism, a movement he valued for its stripping away of conventions that obfuscated the true significance of things. Later he regretted that imagism had “dribbled off into so called ‘free verse’ ” and declared himself an objectivist, valuing the rigor of form. Williams called on his contemporaries to create a distinctly American art, arising out of the materials of the place, responding to contemporary necessities, firmly rooted in particulars: “No ideas but in things,” he insisted time and again. These edits find their culmination in Williams’ masterpiece Paterson (1946-58), a five-volume poem that recounts the history of Rutherford and nearby Paterson and transforms the locale into the embodiment of modern humanity.(Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)