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*Jack Kerouac Alley (formerly Adler Alley or Adler Place) is a one-way alleyway in Chinatown, San Francisco, California that connects Grant Avenue and Columbus Avenue, running between "Vesuvio Cafe" (255 Columbus Ave.) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "City Lights Books" (261 Columbus Ave.).

William Carlos Williams
1883-1963

William Carlos Williams Quotes

“Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.” -William Carlos Williams

“It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.” -William Carlos Williams

“You slapped my face Oh but so gently I smiled At the caress.” -William Carlos Williams

“There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time.” -William Carlos Williams

“It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages.” -William Carlos Williams

“It was the love of love, the love that swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of nature, of people, of animals, a love engendering gentleness and goodness that moved me and that I saw in you.” -William Carlos Williams

“In summer, the song sings itself.” -William Carlos Williams

“Thus having prepared their buds against a sure winter the wise trees stand sleeping in the cold.” -William Carlos Williams

“I have discovered that most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them. . . .” -William Carlos Williams

“What power has love but forgiveness?” -William Carlos Williams

“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” -William Carlos Williams

“It is at the edge of a petal that love waits.” -William Carlos Williams

“The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.” -William Carlos Williams

“I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!” -William Carlos Williams

“Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?” -William Carlos Williams

“Well-- all things turn bitter in the end whether you choose the right or the left way and-- dreams are not a bad thing.” -William Carlos Williams

“Sleep! There is hunting in heaven -- Sleep safe till tomorrow.” -William Carlos Williams

“When they ask me, as of late they frequently do, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.” -William Carlos Williams

“Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination.” -William Carlos Williams

“A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.” -William Carlos Williams

“I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can't understand it?” -William Carlos Williams

“Some leaves hang late, some fall before the first frost--so goes the tale of winter branches and old bones.” -William Carlos Williams

“It is summer, it is the solstice the crowd is cheering, the crowd is laughing in detail permanently, seriously without thought.” -William Carlos Williams

“Night is a room darkened for lovers. . . .” -William Carlos Williams

“Life is valuable -- when completed by the imagination. And then only.” -William Carlos Williams

“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” -William Carlos Williams

“History, history! We fools, what do we know or care? History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery.” -William Carlos Williams

Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams : @ "Literary Kicks"	William Carlos Williams: Bibliography	William Carlos Williams: Additional Poems	American Literature Web Resources:William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams:American Passages	William Carlos Williams: @ from the episode in the Voices & Vision series at a page on the Annenberg Media Multimedia Collection web site.	William Carlos William’s To a Friend Concerning Several Ladies : Dan Schneider	William Carlos Williams: Recordings originally compiled and published from Keele University, England - PennSound
William Carlos Williams: Online Works	William Carlos Williams : William Carlos Williams Review	William Carlos Williams : @ Literature, Arts and Medicine Database	"This Is Just to Say" : By William Carlos Williams
Modernism and Experimentation : Authors: William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)	George Washington as seen by William Carlos Williams : By William Carlos Williams	William Carlos Williams: Selecteds	William Carlos Williams - On "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book I" :Modern American Poetry
William Carlos Williams - On "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" : @ Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "Proletarian Portrait": Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "Portrait of a Lady": Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "Queen-Anne's-Lace" : Modern American Poetry
William Carlos Williams - On "Spring and All" : Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Descent of Winter": Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Descent" : Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Great Figure" Modern American Poetry
William Carlos Williams - On "The Red Wheelbarrow" Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Yachts" Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "The Young Housewife" Modern American Poetry
		William Carlos Williams - On "The Young Sycamore" Modern American Poetry	William Carlos Williams - On "This is Just to Say" Modern American Poetry
William Carlos Williams - On "To Elsie" Modern American Poetrys	Poet William Carlos Williams Describes the Crowd at the Ballpark @ "History Matters"	William Carlos Williams The Reader's Companion to American History	William Carlos Williams The Academy of American Poets
William Carlos Williams @ The Beat Page	William Carlos Williams The National Book Foundation	The Writings of William Carlos Williams Publicity for the Self Daniel Morris	William Carlos Williams Collection University of Delaware
Voices and Visions Spolight - William Carlos Williams Poems With Video & Sound	William Carlos Williams Biography & Poems of William Carlos Williams - @ American Poems	William Carlos Williams @ Wikipedia	William Carlos Williams Classroom Issues and Strategies
William Carlos Williams @ Who2	Physician and Author 1883-1963 Notable American Unitarians	William Carlos Williams Selected Poems	William Carlos Williams @ Everthing2
William Carlos Williams @ Info Please	William Carlos Williams Brief Bio & Poems	William Carlos Williams Encyclopedia Britannica	The Collected Stories William Carlos Williams
Telegraph Hill Books, Etc. Beat Generation Books & Beat Era Jazz	Spring and All - William Carlos Williams

Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with Modernism.

Life

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a town near the city of Paterson. His father was an English immigrant, and his mother was born in Puerto Rico. He attended public school in Rutherford, New Jersey until 1897, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann High School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During his time at Penn, Williams befriended Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth. These friendships supported his growing passion for poetry. He received his M.D. in 1906 and spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad (e.g., at the Univ. of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics). He returned to Rutherford in 1910 and began his medical practice, which lasted until 1951. Ironically, most of his patients knew little if anything of his writings and instead they viewed him as an old-fashioned doctor who helped deliver over 2,000 of their children into the world.

In 1912 he married his fiancée Florence (Flossie, "the floss of his life") Herman. The newlyweds moved into a house at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford; and his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published. The Williamses spent most of the rest of their lives in Rutherford, New Jersey, although the couple did travel occasionally. One such trip was to Europe in 1924. There Williams spent time with fellow writers such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Williams returned home alone that year, while his wife and sons stayed in Europe so that the boys could have a year abroad as Williams and his brother had had in their youth. Much later in his career, Williams traveled the United States to give poetry readings and lectures. Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, 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.

Williams aligned himself with liberal Democratic and left wing issues. In 1949 he published a booklet/poem The Pink Church that was about the human body but was misunderstood as being pro-communist. This supposed pro-communism led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, a fact that led to him being treated for clinical depression. Williams' had a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1951 a series of strokes followed. William Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine. Two days later, finally a British publisher announced that he was going to print his poems – one of fate’s ironies, since Williams had always protested the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the USA.

Career

During his time in New York City (about 1906-1910), Williams became friends with the avant-garde modern artists Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Around this time he got to know the Dadaist movement. That is why many of his earlier poems are influenced by Dadaist and Surrealist principles. In general, he found modern art very inspiring. Williams even was involved in the "Armory Show" in 1913 (read the link).

While Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T.S. Eliot's (see The Waste Land) frequent use of allusions to foreign languages, religion, history or art, Williams drew his themes from what he called "the local." He coined the expression "No ideas but in things", his famous summation of his poetic method. What he meant is that poets should leave traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions aside and try to see the world through the eyes of an ordinary person. Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read", to use a phrase of Marianne Moore, another doubter of poetic meter. He was concerned with writing poetry in a recognizably American idiom.

In May 1963, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His major works are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), Paterson (1963, repr. 1992), and Imaginations (1970). 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.

Poetry

Williams is best known for his poem The Red Wheelbarrow, which is considered the model example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also This Is Just To Say). He also coined the Imagist motto "no ideas but in things." However, Williams did not personally subscribe to Imagist ideas, which were more a product of Ezra Pound and H.D.. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, which rejected European influences in poetry in favor of regional dialogues and influences. In particular, his call for more regionalism in American literature came on the heels of his brief collaboration with Ezra Pound in editing an early draft of T.S. Eliot's epic poem The Waste Land. T.S. Eliot's poem exemplified what Williams disliked about European influences on American poetics.

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 of words" (as he decribed a poem on one occasion) 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 (H.D.) also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth:

"Asteres men amphi kalan selannan aps' apukpuptoisi faenon eithos &oppota plithoisa malista lampsi gan epi paisan" "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 "Pictures from Brueghel" 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 never stopped searching for the perfect line. He experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the “triadic” or “stepped line’’, a long line which is divided into three segments. This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie". 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.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Poems (1909)
• The Tempers (1913)
• Al Que Quiere (1917)
• Kora in Hell. Improvisations (1920, repr. 1973)
• Sour Grapes (1921)
• Go Go (1923)
• Spring and All (1923; repr. 1970)
• 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)

Prose

• Kora in Hell (1920)
• The Great American Novel (1923)
• In the American Grain (1925, 1967, repr. New Directions 2004)
• Novelette and Other Prose (1932)
• Autobiography (1951; 1967)
• 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)
• Imaginations (1970)
• The Embodiment of Knowledge (1974)
• 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 Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998)
• William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson: A Transatlantic Connection (1998)
• A Voyage to Pagany (1928; repr. 1970)
• The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories (1932; repr. 1974)
• White Mule (1937; repr. 1967)
• Life along the Passaic River (1938)
• In the Money (1940; repr. 1967)
• Make Light of It: Collected Stories (1950)
• The Build-Up (1952)
• The Farmers' Daughters: Collected Stories (1961)
• The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams (1996)

Drama

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

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