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Williams represents a strand of modernism that is markedly different from the work of expatriate poets T. S. Eliot and Pound. Unlike his contemporaries, Williams wanted to write poetry that used the American idiom and focused on the world available to him in northern New Jersey. When he wrote about art, he wrote from the perspective of an ordinary visitor in the gallery, not as an insider flaunting a special aesthetic education. He affirmed that poetry should sound like common American speech and should not take the form that Pound came to favor, a verse littered with esoteric allusions. The painters he favored were those a bit like himself, artists who celebrated the color and feel of ordinary life.
Williams’s poetry is deceptively simple, and his verse can often achieve an austerity and surprise that link him to symbolism, imagism, and experimentation with haiku. Many of his poems, including the famous and brief “The Red Wheelbarrow” observation, depend on ingenious line breaks and visual organization for their poignancy. Williams’s longest poem, Paterson, is an epic work that takes the industrial city of the title as its locale and chronicles the history of the people and place from its inception to the present. Williams draws on Joyce’s circular structure in Finnegans Wake and echoes Eliot’s use of the modern city in The Waste Land, but the specifically American diction and emphasis on the particular render it starkly original.
One of the most influential modern American poets, Williams received the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1963. His celebration of American colloquial speech and dedication to careful description are continued in the work of countless modern poets.
[4996] Anonymous, William Carlos Williams (1963),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-109601].
Drawing on such predecessors as Walt Whitman, poet William Carlos Williams sought to write in a distinctly “American” voice. In his efforts to capture the American idiom, Williams composed poems about such “trivial” things as plums and wheelbarrows.
[5493] Lewis W. Hine, Paterson, New Jersey–Textiles (1937),
courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Apartment above the cafe of a retired silk worker living on an eighteen-dollar-a-month pension. Some modernist writers dealt with poverty, class, and social protest in their work. William Carlos Williams wrote a long poem called Paterson.
[7128] Anonymous, Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio (c. 1933),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [HABS, ILL,16-OAKPA,5-2].
Photograph of entrance to Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio, looking southeast, near Chicago, an example of how Wright used orientalism in his architecture.
[8950] Pancho Savery, Interview: “Rhythms in Poetry” (2003),
courtesy of American Passages.
Professor of English Pancho Savery discusses William Carlos Williams’s relationship to American poetry.