William Carlos Williams

From Philosopedia

Williams, William Carlos (17 September 1883 – 4 March 1963)

The first decisively pragmatic poet of America, Williams is said to have delivered babies by day - he was a New Jersey physician - and poems by night, sometimes vice versa. He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his Pictures From Brueghel (1963), a collection of poems.

Williams wrote Paterson (1946–1958), a book in five parts (which was written partly, and ironically, after he had suffered a series of strokes; he was unable to write a sixth part. By describing life in an American city, Williams voiced his feelings as to a poet’s duty. This meant for him writing about what he could see, touch, and be certain of - coming in late, doing his rounds, watching his wife do chores, parking the car, looking at a wheelbarrow or at flowers or birds.

Wallace Stevens thought Williams’s work was too casual, and Martin Seymour-Smith says his poetic achievement is but a minor one. Others, however, consider him to be one of the most important and original American poets of the century. Still others have praised his witty play, Many Love (1940), about a playwright loved by his leading lady as well as by a rich homosexual patron. The work was one of the first to portray realistic homosexual and lesbian relationships on Broadway.

In 1956, he wrote Warren Allen Smith, who asked his views about humanism:

• There is no good to be got in my pondering the question as between a “theistic humanism” or a “humanistic humanism” for more than a passing moment. Atheism is laughable as a positive belief. The death of every man is for him the end; knowing nothing about it, I am forced by common observation to believe it. I can’t say positively that this is so; I can only say that since all data in the case are withheld from me, I find myself absolutely unconcerned. As a physician I do not find any basis for believing in the supernatural. I live side by side with men who believe in the miracles of Christ and, though they are my friends, we never discuss our beliefs together. I am not interested in their beliefs. Nor am I interested in the existentialists, whose more or less complex beliefs are of no more importance to me than the demonstrations of Descartes. The brain is a complex mechanism and the fascination for man in becoming involved in its complexities has always intrigued me. This is a necessity for the development of our mechanistic sciences including the theories of Dr. Freud, but it has nothing to do with the beginning and the course and the death of a man. Since I can’t exclude what I do not know and can’t at the same time believe in it, I am forced to spend my time on earth with other occupations. Laughter at the fools does not completely fill my days, though it occupies many of my idle moments—accompanied by tolerant tears as befits a man of my predilections. I was bred a Unitarian, but whether I transect the cone of my preferences nearer or farther from the light has become, as I grow older, indifferent to me. There is much that is attractive in polytheism to the artist—the poet, that is—when he contemplates the spectrum. All that is left to me, being forced back from any knowledge except the report of the senses, is a humanistic naturalism, lit by the lightnings which play about the minds of saints and sinners.

Dr. Williams was a member of the Rutherford Unitarian Church in New Jersey, which his parents had helped to found.

(See entry for Paul Mariani, one of his biographers.)

{CE; TYD; UU; WAS, 25 March 1956}

- Gravestone in Rutherford, New Jersey