William Carlos Williams Quick Facts

William Carlos Williams, Pulitzer Prize-winning American physician, poet, short-story writer, novelist and essayist of the 20th-century modernist movement.

Profile

Full Name: William Carlos Williams
Birth Name: William Carlos Williams
Date of Birth: September 17, 1883
Place of Birth: Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
Zodiac Sign: Virgo
Date of Death: March 4, 1963
Died at Age: 79
Place of Death: Rutherford, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
Place of Burial: Hillside Cemetery, Lyndhurst, Bergen County, New Jersey, United States of America
Epitaph:

“William Carlos

1883-1963”

Cause of Death: Cerebrovascular thrombosis
Last Words: NA
Ethnicity: Mixed
Nationality: American
Father: William George Williams (1853-1918)
Mother: Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams (Elena) (1856 -1949)
Siblings:

Brother: Edgar Irving Williams (1884-1974)

Spouse: Florence Hilda Herman Williams (b. 1890-d. 1976) (m. 1912)

Children:

Son: William E. Williams (b. 1914)
Son: Paul H. Williams (b. 1917)

Alma Mater: University of Pennsylvania
Occupation: Writer, physician
William Carlos Williams is known for: revolutionizing American poetry by rejecting traditional conventions of rhyme and meter, and using colloquial American English.
William Carlos Williams is criticized for: frequent delivery of contradictory and confused opinions.
William Carlos Williams was influenced by: John Keats (1795–1821), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), James Joyce (1882 –1941), Ezra Pound (1885–1972), and Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC).
William Carlos Williams’ works inspired: Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Charles Tomlinson (1927–2015), the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School.
Literary movement: Modernism, Imagism

Quotes

“The earth cracks and
is shriveled up;
the wind moans piteously;
the sky goes out
if you should fail.”
– William Carlos Williams, Chicory and Daisies [from Al Que Quiere! (1917)]

Awards and Achievements

Bollingen Prize (1953)
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1963)
United States Poet Laureate (1952)
National Book Award for Poetry (1950)
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Poetry (1963)

Major Literary Works

Poetry

Poems (1909)
The Tempers (1913)
Al Que Quiere! (1917)
Sour Grapes (1921)
Spring and All (1923)
Go Go (1923)
The Cod Head (1932)
Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (1934)
An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)
Adam & Eve & The City (1936)
The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938 (1938)
The Broken Span (1941)
The Wedge (1944)
Paterson Book I (1946); Book II (1948); Book III (1949); Book IV (1951); Book V (1958)
Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia (1948)
The Collected Later Poems (1950; rev. ed.1963)
Collected Earlier Poems (1951; rev. ed., 1966)
The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954)
Journey to Love (1955)
Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)
Paterson (Books I-V in one volume, (1963)

Prose

Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920)
The Great American Novel (1923)
Spring and All (1923)
In the American Grain (1925)
A Voyage to Pagany (1928)
Novelette and Other Prose (1932)
The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories (1932)
White Mule (1937)
Life along the Passaic River (1938)
In the Money (1940)
Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
Autobiography (1951) W. W. Norton & Co. (1 February 1967)
The Build-Up (1952)
Selected Essays (1954)
The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957)
I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958)
Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (1959)
The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961)
Imaginations (1970)
The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974)
Interviews With William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead" (1976)
A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists (1978)
William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Stories: Compiled by Robert Coles (1984)
Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996)
The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (1996)
The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)
William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (1998)
The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke (2004)

Drama

Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1962)

Translations

Last Nights of Paris (1929)
By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 (2011)

The Dog and the Fever (2018)

Did You Know?

Williams was the eldest of the two sons born to William George and Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb.
His father was English but raised in the Dominican Republic. His mother was a native of Puerto Rico of half French and half a genetic mixture of Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish extraction.
Although coincidental, his paternal grandmother’s name was Emily Dickinson, which resembles the name of a prominent American poet.
His younger brother, Edgar Williams was a renowned architect whose most outstanding designs include Donnell Library Center and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in Manhattan.
Williams fell in love with Charlotte Herman (Lotte), who ditched him for his younger brother, Edgar. Just three days after the rejection, he proposed to Charlotte’s younger sister, Florence (Flossie), who agreed to marry Williams in future.
His eldest son followed Williams’ footsteps and became a doctor.
Williams was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) in May 1963.
Even though he had a successful literary career, Williams’ was mainly a physician.
Surprisingly, being one of the most prolific writers, Williams authored only one medical article which was published in the Archives of Pediatrics in August 1913.
His father was a businessman, working with advertising. He was a literature enthusiast and introduced his son to literary giants, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and most notably the Bible.
Williams’ mother was a painter with a degree in art from Paris, who inspired him to paint in his early years.
At high school, Williams was mostly interested in math and science. However, during this time he also became interested in literature and wrote his first poem as well.
In 1902, Williams met Ezra Pound and they became bosom friends. Although they always criticized each other’s poetry, their friendship remained intact until Williams’ demise.
After meeting Pound, Williams deviated from the conventions of Shakespeare, Keats and Whitman and tended towards imagist poetry.
Williams attended the Horace Mann School. He did not have to go to college at all since the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania used to admit selected students from reputed schools.
Having received his medical degree from Pennsylvania in 1906, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York.
He went to the University of Leipzig to study paediatrics and upon completion of the course, he started practising paediatrics in Rutherford in 1910.

Media Gallery

Photos

William Carlos Williams with his mother, Elena

William Carlos Williams with his Wife, Florence (Flossie)

References

Carter, Richard. “William Carlos Williams (1883–1963): physician-writer and “godfather of

avant garde poetry.” The Annals of Thoracic Surgery. 2020. Elsevier Inc. 31 May 2020

<https://www.annalsthoracicsurgery.org/article/S0003-4975(99)00293-3/fulltext>.

“William Carlos Williams.” Find a Grave. 2020. Find a Grave.

31 May 2020<https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1112/william-carlos-williams>.

“William Carlos Williams.” Poetry Foundation. 2020. Poetry Foundation.

31 May 2020< https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-carlos-williams>.

“William Carlos Williams.” Wikipedia. 2020. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

31 May 2020< https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams >.

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