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William Carlos Williams
Sign in to saveAmerican poet (1883-1963)
William Carlos Williams was an American poet who lived from 1883 to 1963 and is known for writing about everyday objects and experiences in direct, accessible language. His work matters because he helped shape modern American poetry by showing that important poems could be written about ordinary things rather than grand or distant subjects.
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Carlos
- Family name
- Williams
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Rutherford
- Place of death
- Rutherford
- Occupation
- writer
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Movement
- objectivist poets
- Image
- William Carlos Williams passport photograph 1921.jpg
Show 10 more facts
- date of birth
- 1883-09-17
- date of death
- 1963-03-04
- Commons category
- William Carlos Williams
- member of
- American Academy of Arts and Letters
- name in native language
- William Carlos Williams
- has works in the collection
- National Gallery of Art
- writing language
- English language
- different from
- William Williams
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
- Commons Creator page
- William Carlos Williams
Sources (10)
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Encyclopedic overview
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American-Puerto Rican poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His Spring and All (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). In his five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best-known poems, "This Is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem "The Great Figure" inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth. Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).
Williams practiced both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "We walk the wards that Williams walked".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “William Carlos Williams” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.