William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene

Abstract

William Carlos Williams was a unique figure in American poetry. A practicing family doctor who continued to care for his patients throughout his poetic career, Williams grounded his poems in a direct engagement both with the object world and with the contemporary social environment of the region where he lived and worked: the area around Rutherford and Paterson, New Jersey. As he continued to refine his craft throughout the first half of the century and into the beginning of the second half, Williams produced a body of poetry as impressive as that of any other American writer of his time. It is a poetry that celebrates the local American scene while remaining determinedly experimental in its form and language. Williams was not alone in attempting to find a poetic language appropriate to the experience of modern America. During the period from 1910 to 1925 American poetry experienced a resurgence that was unprecedented in its breadth and intensity, as a steady stream of emerging new talent transformed the literary landscape. In addition to Frost, Eliot, Stevens, Lowell, H. D., and Moore, the list of important poets publishing their first volumes during these years included Robinson Jeffers, Vachel Lindsay, Conrad Aiken, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carl Sandburg, Alfred Kreymborg, Witter Bynner, Archibald MacLeish, Charles Reznikoff, John Crowe Ransom, E. E. Cummings, Yvor Winters, and Jean Toomer.