William Carlos Williams (1883–1963): Williams was born in Rutherford, New
Jersey, the son of a New York businessman who had immigrated from
England and a Puerto Rican mother. Williams’s parents were both lovers of
the arts (his mother was a painter) and speakers of several languages, who
sent their son to boarding school in Switzerland and France when he was
14. Though he shared these passions, Williams also excelled in math and
science and, after completing high school at a New York preparatory
academy, entered the University of Pennsylvania medical school. Williams
would go on to excel in two careers: for more than forty years, he was a
family physician who principally served working class and immigrant
families in and around the town of Paterson, New Jersey, where he had
settled as an adult. At the same time, Williams established himself as one
of the most important American poets of the first half of the 20th century.
Along with contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens,
Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore, Williams was a literary innovator who
sought to revitalize modern poetry—and make it more immediately
responsive to the conditions and concerns of modern life—by freeing it from
19th century conventions of poetic form, diction, and subject matter. While
Williams, like other American modernist poets, was attentive to and
influenced by international movements in the arts and global cultural and
political events, he insisted in his life and in his art on remaining grounded
