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American Poet William Carlos Williams 1883 - 1963

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician"; but during his long lifetime, Williams excelled at both.

Early years

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey to an English father and a Puerto Rican mother. He received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He attended the Horace Mann High School upon his return to New York City and after having passed a special examination, he was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania.

Family

Williams married Florence Herman (1891–1976) in 1912, after his first proposal to her older sister was refused. They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Shortly afterward, his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published. On a trip to Europe in 1924, Williams spent time with writers Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Florence and Williams' sons stayed behind in Europe to experience living abroad for a year as Williams and his brother had in their youth.

Career

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

During the First World War, when a number of European artists established themselves in New York City, Williams became friends with members of the avant-garde both American, such as Man Ray, and visitors from Europe, such as Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1915 Williams began to be associated with a group of New York artists and writers known as "The Others". Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and by Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Duchamp. Through these involvements Williams got to know the Dadaist movement, which may explain the influence on his earlier poems of Dadaist and Surrealist principles. His involvement with The Others made Williams a key member of the early modernist movement in America.

Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land. Williams preferred to draw his themes from what he called "the local". In his modernist epic collage of place, Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, he examined the role of the poet in American society. Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and in Paterson). He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is. Marianne Moore, another skeptic of traditional poetic forms, wrote Williams had used "plain American which cats and dogs can read," with distinctly American idioms.

One of his most notable contributions to American literature was his willingness to be a mentor for younger poets. Though Pound and Eliot may have been more lauded in their time, a number of important poets in the generations that followed were either personally tutored by Williams or pointed to Williams as a major influence. He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s: poets of the Beat Generation, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. He personally mentored Theodore Roethke, and Charles Olson, who was instrumental in developing the poetry of the Black Mountain College and subsequently influenced many other poets. Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, two other poets associated with Black Mountain, studied under Williams. Williams was friends with Kenneth Rexroth, the founder of the San Francisco Renaissance. A lecture Williams gave at Reed College was formative in inspiring three other important members of that Renaissance: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jerseyite Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg claimed that Williams essentially freed his poetic voice. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote introductions to two of Ginsberg's books, including Howl. Williams sponsored unknown poets such as H.H. Lewis, a radical Missouri Communist poet, who he believed wrote in the voice of the people. Though Williams consistently loved the poetry of those he mentored, he did not always like the results of his influence on other poets (the perceived formlessness, for example, of other Beat Generation poets). Williams believed more in the interplay of form and expression.

Death

After Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1949 a series of strokes followed. He also underwent treatment for clinical depression in a psychiatric hospital during 1953. Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Two days after his death, a British publisher announced that he was going to print his poems. During his lifetime, Williams had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the United States, and Williams had always protested against the English influence on American poetry.

Poetry

Williams' major collections are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), Paterson (1963, repr. 1992), and Imaginations (1970). His most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow", considered an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also "This Is Just To Say"). However, Williams, like his associate Ezra Pound, had long ago rejected the imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture.

Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He then came up with the concept of the variable foot evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from the first person perspective as a part of the day in the life as a physician. The variable foot is rooted within the multi-faceted American Idiom. This discovery was a part of his keen observation of how radio and newspaper influenced how people communicated and represents the "machine made out of words" (as he described a poem in the introduction to his book, The Wedge) just as the mechanistic motions of a city can become a consciousness. Williams didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems. His correspondence with Hilda Doolittle also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth:

"The stars about the beautiful moon again hide their radiant shapes, when she is full and shines at her brightest on all the earth"—Sappho.

This is to be contrasted with a poem from Journey To Love titled "Shadows":

"Shadows cast by the street light
under the stars,
the head is tilted back,
the long shadow of the legs
presumes a world taken for granted
on which the cricket trills"

The breaks in the poem search out a natural pause spoken in the American idiom that is also reflective of rhythms found within jazz sounds that also touch upon Sapphic harmony. Williams experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the "stepped triadic line", a long line which is divided into three segments. This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie" and "The Ivy Crown." Here again one of Williams' aims is to show the truly American (i.e., opposed to European traditions) rhythm which is unnoticed but present in everyday American language. Stylistically, Williams worked with variations on free-form styles, notably developing and utilising the triadic line as in his lengthy love-poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.

Politics

Modern liberals portray Williams as aligned with liberal democratic issues; however, as his publications in more politically radical journals like New Masses suggest, his political commitments were further to the left than the term "liberal" indicates. He considered himself a socialist and opponent of capitalism, and in 1935 published "The Yachts", a poem which indicts the rich elite as parasites and the masses as striving for revolution. The poem features an image of the ocean as the "watery bodies" of the poor masses beating at their hulls "in agony, in despair", attempting to sink the yachts and end "the horror of the race". Furthermore, in the introduction to his 1944 book of poems "The Wedge", he writes of socialism as an inevitable future development and as a necessity for true art to develop. In 1949, he published a booklet/bar "The Pink Church" that was about the human body but was understood, in the context of McCarthyism, as being dangerously pro-communist. The anti-communist movement led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, an event that contributed to his being treated for clinical depression. In an unpublished article for Blast, Williams wrote artists should resist producing propaganda and be "devoted to writing (first and last)." However, in the same article Williams claims that art can also be "in the service of the proletariat".

Legacy, awards and honors

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Bibliography

Poetry collections

  • Poems (1909)
  • The Tempers (1913)
  • Al Que Quiere! (1917)
  • Sour Grapes (1921)
  • Spring and All (1923)
  • Go Go (1923)
  • The Cod Head (1932)
  • Collected Poems, 1921-1931 (1934)
  • An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)
  • Adam & Eve & The City (1936)
  • The Complete Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, 1906-1938 (1938)
  • The Broken Span (1941)
  • The Wedge (1944)
  • Paterson Book I (1946); Book II (1948); Book III (1949); Book IV (1951); Book V (1958)
  • Clouds, Aigeltinger, Russia (1948)
  • The Collected Later Poems (1950; rev. ed.1963)
  • Collected Earlier Poems (1951; rev. ed., 1966)
  • The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954)
  • Journey to Love (1955)
  • Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)
  • Paterson (Books I-V in one volume, (1963)
  • Imaginations (1970)
  • Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1909-1939 (1988)
  • Collected Poems: Volume 2, 1939-1962 (1989)
  • Early Poems (1997)
  • By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 New Directions Publishing (Sept. 2011)

Books, prose

  • Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920) - Prose-poem improvisations.
  • The Great American Novel (1923) - A novel.
  • Spring and All (1923) - A hybrid of prose and verse.
  • In the American Grain (1925), 1967, repr. New Directions 2004 - Prose on historical figures and events.
  • A Voyage to Pagany (1928) - An autobiographical travelogue in the form of a novel.
  • Novelette and Other Prose (1932)
  • The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories (1932)
  • White Mule (1937) - A novel.
  • Life along the Passaic River (1938) - Short stories.
  • In the Money (1940) - Sequel to White Mule.
  • Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
  • Autobiography (1951) W. W. Norton & Co. (1 February 1967) ISBN 978-0811202268
  • The Build-Up (1952) - Completes the "Stecher trilogy" begun with White Mule.
  • Selected Essays (1954)
  • The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams (1957)
  • I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet (1958)
  • Yes, Mrs. Williams: A Personal Record of My Mother (1959)
  • The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961)
  • Imaginations (1970) - A collection of five previously published early works.
  • The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974) - Philosophical and critical notes and essays.
  • Interviews With William Carlos Williams: "Speaking Straight Ahead" (1976)
  • A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists (1978)
  • Pound/Williams: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (1996)
  • The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (1996)
  • The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)
  • William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (1998)
  • The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke (2004)

Drama

  • Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams (1961)

Canadian Poet Michael Ondaatje 1943

Philip Michael Ondaatje ( born September 12, 1943), OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Burgher origin. He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film.

Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, (then Ceylon) in 1943 and moved to England in 1954. He attended Dulwich College - Alma Mater of literary luminaries such as P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. He studied for a time at Bishop's College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto, where he received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He then began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1970, he settled in Toronto and, from 1971 to 1990, taught English Literature there at York University and Glendon College.

Ondaatje's work includes fiction, autobiography, poetry and film. He has published thirteen books of poetry, and won the Governor General's Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979). Anil's Ghost was winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award. The English Patient won of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Governor General's Award and later made into a motion picture, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. The English Patient could be considered a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987). In the Skin of a Lion, a fictional story about early immigrant settlers in Toronto, won the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award, finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and winner of the first Canada Reads competition in 2002. Coming Through Slaughter, is a fictional story of New Orleans, Louisiana circa 1900 loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. It was the winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award. Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General's Award.Running in the Family (1982) is a semi-fictional memoir of his Sri Lankan childhood.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Divisadero have been adapted for the stage and produced in numerous theatrical productions across North America and Europe. Ondaatje's three films include a documentary on fellow poet B.P. Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, which chronicles a collaborative theatre experience led in 1971 by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille. In 2002, Ondaatje published a non-fiction book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which won special recognition at the 2003 American Cinema Editors Awards, as well as a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for best book of the year on the moving image.

Since the 1960s, Ondaatje has been involved with Toronto's Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor. Ondaatje and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding. In 1988, Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ondaatje has two children and is the brother of philanthropist, businessman and author Christopher Ondaatje. Ondaatje's nephew David is a film director and screenwriter who made the 2009 film The Lodger.

Books

Novels

  • 1976: Coming Through Slaughter (also see "Other" section, 1980, below), Toronto: Anansi ISBN 0393087654 ; New York: W. W. Norton, 1977
  • 1987: In the Skin of a Lion, New York: Knopf, ISBN 0394563638, ISBN 0140113096
  • 1992: The English Patient, New York: Knopf, ISBN 0679416781, ISBN 0679745203
  • 2000: Anil's Ghost, New York: Knopf, ISBN 0375410538
  • 2007: Divisadero, ISBN 0307266354 ISBN 9780307266354
  • 2011: The Cat's Table, ISBN 978-0-7710-6864-5, ISBN 0-7710-6864-6

Poetry collections

  • 1962: Social Call, The Love Story, In Search of Happiness, all featured in The Mitre: Lennoxville: Bishop University Press
  • 1967: The Dainty Monsters, Toronto: Coach House Press
  • 1969: The Man with Seven Toes, Toronto: Coach House Press
  • 1970: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems (also see "Other" section, 1973, below), Toronto: Anansi ISBN 0887840183 ; New York: Berkeley, 1975
  • 1973: Rat Jelly, Toronto: Coach House Press
  • 1978: Elimination Dance/La danse eliminatoire, Ilderton: Nairn Coldstream; revised edition, Brick, 1980
  • 1979: There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems, 1963-1978, New York: W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 1979 ISBN 0393011917, ISBN 039302100X
    • published as Rat Jelly, and Other Poems, 1963-1978, London, United Kingdom: Marion Boyars, 1980
  • 1984: Secular Love, Toronto: Coach House Press, ISBN 0889102880, ISBN 0393019918 ; New York: W. W. Norton, 1985
  • 1986: All along the Mazinaw: Two Poems (broadside), Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Woodland Pattern
  • 1986: Two Poems, Woodland Pattern, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  • 1989: The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems, London, United Kingdom: Pan; New York: Knopf, 1991
  • 1998: Handwriting, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart; New York: Knopf, 1999 ISBN 0375405593
  • 2006: The Story, Toronto: House of Anansi, ISBN 0887841945

Editor

  • 1971: The Broken Ark, animal verse; Ottawa: Oberon; revised as A Book of Beasts, 1979 ISBN 0887500501
  • 1977: Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Thomas, and Blaise, Toronto: Oxford University Press ISBN 0195402774
  • 1979: A Book of Beasts, animal verse; Ottawa: Oberon; revision of The Broken Ark, 1971
  • 1979: The Long Poem Anthology, Toronto: Coach House ISBN 0889101779
  • 1989: With Russell Banks and David Young, Brushes with Greatness: An Anthology of Chance Encounters with Greatness, Toronto: Coach House, 1989
  • 1989: Edited with Linda Spalding, The Brick Anthology, illustrated by David Bolduc, Toronto: Coach House Press
  • 1990: From Ink Lake: An Anthology of Canadian Short Stories; New York: Viking ISBN 0394281381
  • 1990: The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories; London, United Kingdom: Faber
  • 2000: Edited with Michael Redhill, Esta Spalding and Linda Spalding, Lost Classics, Toronto: Knopf Canada ISBN 0-676-97299-3 ; New York: Anchor, 2001
  • 2002: Edited and wrote introduction, Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories, New York: New York Review Books

Other

  • 1970: Leonard Cohen (literary criticism), Toronto: McClelland & Stewart
  • 1973: The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (play; based on his poetry; see "Poetry" section, 1970, above), produced in Stratford, Ontario; produced in New York, 1974; produced in London, England, 1984
  • 1979: Claude Glass (literary criticism), Toronto: Coach House Press
  • 1980: Coming through Slaughter (play based on his novel; see "Novels" section, 1976, above), first produced in Toronto
  • 1982: Running in the Family, memoir, New York: W. W. Norton, ISBN 0393016374, ISBN 0771068840
  • 1982: Tin Roof, British Columbia, Canada: Island, ISBN 0919479103, ISBN 0919479936
  • 1987: In the Skin of a Lion (based on his novel), New York: Knopf
  • 1994: Edited with B. P. Nichol and George Bowering, An H in the Heart: A Reader, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart
  • 1996: Wrote introduction, Anthony Minghella, adaptor, The English Patient: A Screenplay, New York: Hyperion Miramax
  • 2002: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, New York: Knopf ISBN 0676974740
  • 2002: Films by Michael Ondaatje
  • 2004: Vintage Ondaatje,