Biography Of Wcw Essay, Research Paper

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), was an American poet, novelist, and physician, who wrote in distinctly American speech about everyday situations. He began writing poetry while a student at Horace Mann High School, at which time he made the decision to become both a writer and a doctor. Williams combined his focus on the ordinary with attempts to connect his reader as closely as possible to the subjects of poems. His poetic experiments had a strong literary influence and inspired such later American poets as Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg.

Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams was educated at the universities of Pennsylvania and Leipzig. After 1910 he practiced medicine in New Jersey in Rutherford and neighboring Paterson. At the same time he continued his literary work and gained a worldwide reputation, first as a poet and later as a writer of prose. Williams’s early verse includes Poems (1909) and The Tempers (1913). His mature work, often varied in technique and form, was influenced by the imagist movement in its rejection of expansive sentimentality, artificiality, and vagueness; instead, Williams’s work relies on emotional restraint, the language of common speech, and a concentration on concrete, sensory experience. He experiments with many different styles, including terza rima (3rd rhyme) and free verse. Examples of his later poetry are contained in Complete Collected Poems (1938) and Collected Poems (1950). In the late 1930s Williams began the composition of an extended poem dealing with the American scene in the period of the depression, Paterson, Books I-V (1946- 1958). His prose works include a widely read collection of essays on American history, In the American Grain (1925), and the novels A Voyage to Pagany (1928), White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-up (1952). Williams had a heart attack in 1948 which was followed by a series of strokes, forcing him to retire from his medical practice. He continued to write until his death on March 4th, 1963. Williams was a highly acclaimed writer, two of his many honors include the National Book Award in 1950 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.