William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.

excerpt from 'Chicory and Daisies' by Stephen Burt inThe London Review of Books 7 March 2002[...] 'What Williams sees, he sees in a flash,' his friends Kenneth Burke remarked in 1922, calling him 'the master of the glimpse': Williams mastered not only the flash and the glimpse but their aural equivalents, the bit of dialogue or monologue which,arranged as verse, illuminates not a scene but a speech and its speaker. 'I've met a hell of a lot of all kinds of people that you'll ever get your eyes on,' Williams said reproachfully to Pound in 1938, 'and I've know them inside and out in ways you'll never know.'Medicine offered him access of a sort that few major poets have had to different registers of speech and kinds of life: he used what he learned, and what he overheard, in striking short stories and in remarkable talk-based poems. [...]

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.

excerpt from 'Chicory and Daisies' by Stephen Burt inThe London Review of Books 7 March 2002[...] 'What Williams sees, he sees in a flash,' his friends Kenneth Burke remarked in 1922, calling him 'the master of the glimpse': Williams mastered not only the flash and the glimpse but their aural equivalents, the bit of dialogue or monologue which,arranged as verse, illuminates not a scene but a speech and its speaker. 'I've met a hell of a lot of all kinds of people that you'll ever get your eyes on,' Williams said reproachfully to Pound in 1938, 'and I've know them inside and out in ways you'll never know.'Medicine offered him access of a sort that few major poets have had to different registers of speech and kinds of life: he used what he learned, and what he overheard, in striking short stories and in remarkable talk-based poems. [...]

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), a great contemporary of Pound, H.D., Wyndham Lewis and others, is one of the fathers of American free verse. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, he received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound. Returning to Rutherford, where he sustained his medical practice throughout his life, Williams began publishing in small magazines and embarked on a prolific career as a poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright.

excerpt from 'Chicory and Daisies' by Stephen Burt inThe London Review of Books 7 March 2002[...] 'What Williams sees, he sees in a flash,' his friends Kenneth Burke remarked in 1922, calling him 'the master of the glimpse': Williams mastered not only the flash and the glimpse but their aural equivalents, the bit of dialogue or monologue which,arranged as verse, illuminates not a scene but a speech and its speaker. 'I've met a hell of a lot of all kinds of people that you'll ever get your eyes on,' Williams said reproachfully to Pound in 1938, 'and I've know them inside and out in ways you'll never know.'Medicine offered him access of a sort that few major poets have had to different registers of speech and kinds of life: he used what he learned, and what he overheard, in striking short stories and in remarkable talk-based poems. [...]