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William Carlos Williams |
Like so many poets of his time, Williams’ life was changed by Ezra Pound, whom he met in college. When his first poetry book foundered in America, Pound got it published in England. When The Waste Land was published in 1922, resetting the poetic compass with its melancholy erudition and post-war pessimism, Williams went to London, talked to Pound, and came home with a different idea.
Over the next twenty years, the everyday doctor found optimism in a small New Jersey city, and expressed it in a new poetic form. Meaning would be conveyed primarily through images. Line breaks and meter would be determined by the rhythms of raw speech. The subject of his poems would be daily life. He was a great friend and supporter of a new generation of poets, and slowly his reputation grew, though in fifteen years his royalties amounted to $130.
When he was named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress in 1952, a researcher decided his poem “Yachts” was an indictment of the rich, and the appointment was revoked because it was felt that Williams harbored “Communist tendencies”. He died at eighty and was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |