William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams, (1883-1963). US poet and writer. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, the son of a British father and a Puerto Rican mother. Although educated mainly in Europe, he later studied medicine and settled in his home town to work as a GP Wilson, Woodrow for some 40 years. He published his first book, Poems, in 1909. By bringing him into contact with all sections of US society, Williams’s work as a doctor had a profound influence on his poetry. In his mature work, which began to appear in the early 1920s, he attempted to forge a new poetic idiom based on colloquial American speech. He summarized his ‘objectivist’ approach to writing in the phrase “No ideas but in things”. His major work is the five-volume Paterson (1946-58), a free-verse evocation of the modern industrial city. Other volumes include Spring and Fall (1923), Collected Later Poems (1950), and Pictures from Brueghel (1963).
