Arts and Letters

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, and except for his years of study and interning and a few trips, lived there, and practiced medicine there, all his life; and his work, from the earliest poems and stories in which he found his true voice, on through his long poem Paterson, is as deeply and fruitfully associated with that locality as is that of Joyce with Dublin or that of Faulkner with Mississippi. Saturation in place was as important, unconsciously, to him as was his conscious saturation in the idiom of that place. His passionate, and, as far as poetry is concerned, almost programmatic Americanism, even localism, receives an emphasis, perhaps, from the fact that his parents were not Americans. The father was of English origin, but with an Englishness tempered, as the son says of him, by the fact that he "grew up in a Caribbean island surrounded by a semi-tropical sea rather than near the Baltic." The mother, to whom the son was devoted, was also from the West Indies, and at the time of his birth could scarcely speak English. In the early years French and Spanish were the languages of the household. And the father never became an American citizen. In the light of these facts, we, as Americans, can take a certain pride in what the life and achievement of William Carlos Williams tells us, symbolically, about one possibility of America.

In Rutherford, except for a year in Switzerland, William Carlos Williams received his schooling, up to his entrance into the Horace Mann High School in New York. Even in high school he felt a deep attraction to the arts (his mother had studied painting in Paris), but by the time he was admitted to the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania he was sure of a fundamental commitment to poetry. And his friendship, at the University, with Ezra Pound and H. D. confirmed his sense of vocation. As for medicine, though it sometimes painfully competed with poetry, it was to make possible the pursuit of poetry.

But it was money that finally decided me. I would continue medicine, for I was determined to be a poet; only medicine, a job I enjoyed, would make it possible for me to live and write as I wanted to…. I would not court disease, live in the slums for the sake of art, give lice a holiday. I would not "die for art," but live for it, grimly! and work, work, work… beat the game, and be free… to write, write as I alone should write, for the sheer drunkenness of it, I might have added.

(Autobiography, p. 51)

Medicine, however, did more than make poetry financially possible for William Carlos Williams. We may hazard that, in a deep sense, it made poetry possible at all. Over the years we find many utterances by William Carlos Williams about the relation—the continuity and the antithesis—of life and poetry. In 1923, in The Great American Novel, he wrote:

One must begin with words if one is to write. But what then of smell? What then of the hair on the trees or golden brown cherries under the black cliffs.

Twenty-five years later, looking back, he was to say to an interviewer:

I have told you before that my two leading forces were trying to know life and trying to find a technique of verse.… The verse must be coldly, intellectually considered. Not the emotion, the heat of life dominating, but the intellectual concept of the thing itself.

(I Wanted to Write A Poem, pp. 82-3)

But the "heat" had to be there before there could be anything to be "coldly" considered. And the life of a doctor, with all its human involvements, could provide that sense of immediacy and emotional commitment that made him come home from his day with patients and sit down and write the stories of The Knife of the Times and Life Along the Passaic River at, as he said, "white heat."

But the practice of medicine demands more than human understanding and pity and sympathy; it demands the intellectually controlled exercise of an exacting craft; and in this perspective the poet's daily life with his patients was leading him to the moment when, after the publication of Paterson, Book II, he could say: "Now I have it." And the "it" meant the understanding of the relation of life and poetry, heat and cold. He now understood, he says, the "sea change" that life must undergo. So, in Paterson, Book III, we find one of the last and most subtle poetic statements of this lifelong and, for him, overwhelmingly important, issue:

The province of the poem is the world.
When the sun rises, it rises in the poem
and when it sets the darkness comes down
and the poem is dark.

William Carlos Williams remained productive until the end of his life. By the time of his death in 1963 he had published some forty books: essays, stories, novels, plays—and, of course, the poems. It is gratifying to think that during this long career his work did not go unappreciated. In 1926 he received the Dial Award; in 1931 the Guarantor's Prize of Poetry magazine; in 1948 the Loines Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1949 the National Book Award for Poetry; in 1953 the Bollingen Prize; in 1955 the Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets; in 1963, posthumously, The Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

William Carlos Williams envisaged early the kind of life he wanted to live. And he envisaged early, however dimly, the kind of poetry he wanted to write. Furthermore, he had the courage and will to live, for more than half a century, by those envisagements. In his age he told an anecdote of his boyhood:

In Uncle Billy Abbott's class at Horace Mann we read a book of Robert Louis Stevenson's—a travel book I think it was. There was a young man and an upset canoe and a line that said, "I never let go of that paddle." I was crazy about that line. I'd say it over and over to myself.

He, apparently, kept saying it over and over to himself all his life. And the world is richer for the fact that he never let go his paddle.