This is a re-post from two years ago.

Today is the birthday of William Carols Williams (1883-1963), one of those people who thought he could be both a successful doctor and a brilliant poet and writer, and who turned out to be right. Among his accomplishments were becoming chief of pediatrics at a general hospital in Paterson, New Jersey, winning the National Book Award for Poetry in 1950, and posthumously winning a Pulitzer in 1963 for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems.

(Full disclosure: our pediatrician is great with the kids, but he’s produced *squat* in terms of literary output. Sure, he knew exactly when it was time to get our older son’s tonsils out, but has he been one of the great forces in modern American poetry? Has he forged new expressions of a peculiarly American sensibility? He has not. Maybe it’s time to shop around.)

Williams was born and raised in Rutherford, New Jersey; his father was English, his mother Puerto Rican, and Williams later wrote in a letter, “Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own.” His father loved literature and his mother was a painter, but Williams first loved math and science; it was while studying at Horace Mann High School in New York City that he became excited about writing and decided to be a writer as well as a doctor. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and met Ezra Pound there, with whom he became lifelong friends and through whom he met other artists, such as the poet Hilda Doolittle, who used to purposely splash ink on herself to achieve that feeling of freedom you get when you, you know, splash ink on yourself. Anywho. Pound helped Williams get his second book of poetry, The Tempers, published in 1913, and for a while Williams was one of the most important of the Imagist poets. Eventually, however, his path diverged from Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s as he sought to work in a uniquely American vein and felt that his poet BFFs were too in love with all things European. In fact, the publication and popularity of Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1922—the same year Williams’ collection Spring and All appeared—came as a blow to Williams because he felt the work “returned us to the classroom” where poetry conformed to rules rather than breaking new ground.

Williams persisted in his own work; he went on to publish more collections of poetry as well as novels, short stories, and essays. Finally in the 1950s and 60s, the poets of the Beat generation got excited about Williams, which is interesting since they always strike one as howling adolescents and he was a consummate grownup with a job. But he was a grownup who had “withstood the influence of Eliot, ignored the New Critics and the academic poets who followed their lead, and simply went his own way…”

NB: I always think of Williams as a short story author first (which is completely whacky), possibly because his story, “The Use of Force,” available in The Doctor Stories (1984), made such an impression on me. The story begins: “They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick.” http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html

Have a good Thursday, do the important things and hang the rest, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.