William Carlos Williams, born in 1883 and died in 1963, was a major poet of his generation and one of the leading poets in the movement departing from traditional English practice, but Williams took his own road and tried to impart to his poetry a new substance and a violent new orientation. He began as early as 1912 by asking, "what was the measurable factor in language that can replace metrics as the basis for poetic composition?" For Williams, this question involved the whole essence of poetry:
Since he believed that experience does not objectively exist until it is embodied in language, the nature of that language--its ability to convey actuality without distorting it through the crippling biases of "literary" means--is all-important (Unger 403).
Williams had several concerns that were constant: 1) he wanted to devise a poetic structure that would formalize experience without deforming it; 2) he wanted to let the beat of speech determine the measure; 3) he wanted to rinse the language of ornament and encrustation; and 4) he wanted to be selective but to allow for accident and impingement. An analysis of several of his poems will show how this was effected.
Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and through his mother's family he had access to several different cultures--French, Spanish, and Jewish. Williams went to public schools in his home town, attended the Unitarian church, and went with his family to Europe for two years when he was 14 years old. He went to school in Geneva and later studied at the LycTe Condorcet in Paris. When he returned to the U.S., he went to Horace Mann High School in new York City. He first decided on a career in medicine and took the entrance examinations, gaining admittance to the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. His interest in poetry also led him to make the acquaintance of poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle and the painter Charles Demuth. Williams graduated i...