William Carlos Williams :: essays research papers

William Carlos Williams was born September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, N.J. His father had emigrated from Birmingham, England, and his mother from Puerto Rico. He was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, where he met two poets, Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound. A long term friendship ensued between Pound and himself, such that Williams said he was able to divide his life into two distinct segments: Before Pound and After Pound.1 From 1906 to 1909 Williams did his internship in New York City, writing verse in between patients. His first book was published in 1909, just before a trip to Leipzig to study pediatrics. In the following years Williams wrote not only poems, but short stories, novels, essays, and an autobiography. In 1946 he began Paterson, an attempt to write an epic poem about the city. Williams died in 1963, while working on the sixth book of Paterson. William Carlos William Carlos Williams based his life on helping the poor and all aspects of the human world that appealed to him were in their most basic form. What appealed to Williams was not the glitzy and glamourful, but the true qualitites sometimes being old and worn out. He found that pride was more important the materialistic qualities. Many of his poems explore nature and use it to explore and explain human behavior as he sees it through his own eyes. A few of these poems that use simplistic language to paint a very descriptive and clear picture of other aspects of life are Love Song, Apology, Pastoral, and Tract; all produced by William Carlos Williams. But there were few things which were very specific and stood out in his works. All these poems use nature to explore aspects of human life. A theme which exists in all of these poems and most of Williams' literature is the simplicity of the language he uses. Many believe he did that in order to separate himself from other poets of his time. Most people believe his justification for the simplicity of his language was because he wanted to stand out, be remembered, and be praised. I agree with them, but maybe it's just the kind of language that appealed to him and he thought would appeal to others as well. The first poem entitled Apology portrays that quality of looking for the true aspects of nature and humans, not the materialistic ones.