WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 1883 -1963

General Information Was born on September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. He’s the son of New York businessman of British extraction and a Puerto Rican mother with artistic talent. Grew up speaking Spanish, French, and English.

Personal Life In childhood, his mother and grandmother were the most important adults to him. The figure woman as an earth mother reflecting that early experience throughout his poetry. John Keats’s traditionally rhymed and metered verse impressed the young poet tremendously, “Keats was my God,” Williams later revealed. In contrast, Whitman’s free verse offered “an impulse toward freedom and release of the self.” He said, “I reserved Whitmanesque’ thoughts, a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my hear and heart from turgid obsessions.”

Personal Life 1906: Received his MD from the University of Pennsylvania where he made important friendships with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. 1910: Set up his own practice in Rutherford

1912: Married Florence Herman (Moved into a house in Rutherford which was home to them and their 2 sons for many years) Williams heath’s began to decline after a heart attack in 1948, and a series of strokes, but he continued writing up until his death in New Jersey on March 4, 1963

Professional Life Famously combined the 2 careers of doctor and writer. As a medical doctor, pediatrics was his specialty, and in the course of his career, he delivered more than two thousand babies. As a writer, he had a reputation of having the idea of what poetry should be and bring poetry into relation with everyday life While working on his major work Paterson, he invented the “triadic” or “stepped line,” a long line broken into the segment.

Awards: National Book Award in 1950. The Bollingen Prize in 1953. The Pulitzer Prize in 1962.

The Work Itself First published book: The Temper (1913). Spring and All (1923). In the American Gain (1925).

The Work Itself During 1930s: The Edge of the Knife (1932). Life along the Passaic River (1938). White Mule (1937). In the Money (1940).

The Work Itself 1930s – 1940s: aligned himself with Liberal Democratic 1951: Autobiography is partly devoted to the medical side of his life and its crucial relation to his poetry.

In 1946, Paterson I, the first book of the epic he had been struggling to write for nearly twenty years, was published. And the series of this work were published in 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958.

References http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/william-carlos-williams http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-carlos-williams http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/bio.htm http://pabook.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Williams__William_Carlos.ht ml