William Carlos Williams

The Doctor Stories collects thirteen of Williams’s stories (direct accounts of his experiences as a doctor), six related poems, and a chapter from his autobiography that connects the worlds of medicine and writing, as well as a new preface by Atul Gawande, an introduction by Robert Coles (who put the book together), and a final note by Williams’s son (also a doctor) about his famous father. The writings are remarkably direct and freshly true. As Atul Gawande notes, “Reading these tales, you find yourself in a conversation with Williams about who people really are—who you really are. Williams recognized that, caring for the people of his city, he had a front-row seat to the human condition. His writing makes us see it and hear it and grapple with it in all its complexities. That is his lasting gift.”

Gathered here are the gems of William Carlos Williams’s astonishing achievements in poetry. Dramatic, energetic, beautiful, and true, this slim selection will delight any reader—The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems is a book to be treasured.

Published in 1917 by The Four Seas Company, Al Que Quiere! was William Carlos Williams’s breakthrough book and contains some of his best-loved poems (“Tract,” “Apology,” “El Hombre,” “Danse Russe,” “Smell!, ”January Morning"), as well as a Whitmanesque concluding long poem, “The Wanderer,” that anticipates his epic masterpiece Paterson. Al Que Quiere! is the culmination of an experimental period for Williams that included his translations from Spanish. The Spanish epigraph of Al Que Quiere! is from the short story “El hombre que parecía un caballo” (“The Man Who Resembled a Horse”), by the Guatemalan author Rafael Arévalo Martínez. This centennial edition contains Williams’s translation of the story, as well as his commentary from a book of conversations, I Wanted to Write a Poem, on the individual poems of Al Que Quiere!

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) produced a startling number of translations of both Spanish and Latin American poetry starting during WWI and continuing through the late fifties. Williams grew up in a Spanish-speaking home and sometimes described himself as half-Spanish. His mother was Puerto Rican and his father spoke Spanish fluently. “Spanish is not, in the sense to which I refer, a literary language,” Williams wrote in his Autobiography. “It has a place of its own, an independent place very sympathetic to the New World.” Williams approached translation as a way not only to present the work of unknown Spanish poets, but also to extend the range and capacity of American poetry, to use language “with unlimited freshness.” Included in this bilingual edition are beautifully rendered translations of poets well-known — Neruda, Paz, and Parra — and lesser-known: Rafael Arévalo Martínez (from Guatemala), Rafael Beltrán Logroño (from Spain), and Eunice Odio (from Costa Rica).

Voted by The New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination – a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that crystalizes in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language recreates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital” (now commonly known by the title “Spring and All”), and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Although Spring and All has been always available in collected works such as Imaginations and Collected Poems: Volume I, this stand-alone facsimile edition makes it shine as the individual book William Carlos Williams intended it to be.

Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed during the years after its publication in 1925. Yet it is “a fundamental book, essential if one proposes to come to terms with American literature” (London Times Literary Supplement). William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus’s discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

New Directions has long published poet William Carlos Williams’ entire body of short fiction as The Farmers’ Daughters (1961). This new edition of The Collected Stories of William Carlos Williams contains all fifty-two stories combining the early collections The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic (1938) with the later collection Make Light of It (1950) and the great long story, “The Farmers’ Daughters” (1956). When these stories first appeared, their vitality and immediacy shocked many readers, as did the blunt, idiosyncratic speech of Williams’ immigrant and working-class characters. But the passage of time has silenced the detractors, and what shines in the best of these stories is the unflinching honesty and deep humanity of Williams’ portraits, burnished by the seeming artlessness which only the greatest masters command.

Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, two towering figures in American poetry, began their lifelong, and often contentious, friendship as students at the University of Pennsylvania. Their correspondence ran from 1907, the year Pound took up his virtually permanent residence in Europe, until Williams’ death in 1963. The letters contribute an unparalleled documentary record of modern culture - a wealth of information about the lives and works of the two poets themselves; the literary and political movements in which they became involved and the impact of public events upon the arts; the activities of other writers and artists; and the world of small presses and little magazines that nourished the growth of modernism.

Pound/Williams contains 169 letters selected from the poets’ surviving correspondence, each letter reproduced in full and accompanied by explanatory notes. Historical introductions place each of the live chronological groupings of letters into context, and a biographical glossary identifies persons prominently mentioned.

“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” first published when William Carlos Williams was seventy-two, forms the heart of this new selection of his love poems. Robert Lowell praised “Asphodel” for delivering “to us what was impossible, something that was poetry and beyond poetry.” Lyrical and moving, elegant and supple, it is charged with sheer musical pleasure. In addition to “Asphodel,” eleven other important love poems have been chosen from the whole range of Williams’ writing life––a life whose history of love is reviewed by Herbert Leibowitz in his incisive introduction. Leibowitz, editor of Parnassus: Poetry in Review magazine and author of forthcoming critical biography of William Carlos Williams, considers “Asphodel” in the context of Williams’ singularly non-traditional love poetry, and distinguishes it as his “most eloquent and unorthodox love poem, a quest for ’abiding love’ in the gathering shadows of death.”

Paterson is both a place—the New Jersey city in whom the person (the poet’s own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined. Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams’ words) “follows the course of the Passaic River” from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

Now available as a New Directions Paperbook, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II, 1939-1962 (originally brought out in 1988) completes the definitive edition of Williams’ published poems (exclusive of Paterson) begun with Volume I. Edited by Christopher MacGowan of the College of William and Mary, this second volume includes the collections Williams published contemporaneously with the first four books of Paterson––The Wedge (1944), The Clouds (1948), and The Pink Church (1949); the two books in which the poet developed his distinctive three-step line––The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955); and his final volume, Pictures from Brueghel (1962), which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for its author. As in Volume I, uncollected poems are arranged chronologically and inserted between the individual books. Extensively researched annotations provide numerous comments by the author on his poems as well as significant textual variants and helpful background information.

Considered by many to be the most characteristically American of our twentieth-century poets, William Carlos Williams “wanted to write a poem/ that you would understand./ …But you got to try hard – " So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams’ radical simplicity, all of his published poetry–excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definitive volumes in 1986 and 1988. Now available as a New Directions Paperbook, this first volume of The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, covering the years 1909 through 1939, begins with the first collection of poems Williams wished to preserve, The Tempers (1913), and includes successive volumes through Adam & Eve & The City (1936) with their contents intact. Uncollected poems of each period are inserted between individual volumes in order of first publication. This careful attention to chronology enables the reader to chart the large contours of Williams’ early career and to appreciate the enormous advances in technique he made during his first decade as a poet. Extensive annotations by the editors (A. Walton Litz, Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton University, and Christopher MacGowan of the College of William and Mary) include significant textual variants as well as a wealth of previously unavailable background information on the poems.

Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets collects all of Williams’ known writings—reviews, essays, introductions, and letters to the editor—on the two generations of poets that followed him, from Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky to Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg. What might have been a random collection of occasional pieces achieves remarkable coherence from the singleness of Williams’ poetic vision: his belief that the secret spirit of ritual, of poetry, was trapped in restrictive molds, and, if these could be broken, the spirit would be able to live again in a new, contemporary form. Only a revived clarity and accuracy in sight and expression would enable the modern world to reform social order which Williams saw in complete disarray. To resuscitate American Poetry, Williams concentrated his efforts on the purification of poetic speech—his American idiom—and on remaking the poetic line in a new measure—his variable foot. And while his battles with his contemporaries on these issues could be heated, he was always a nurturing father to the young, “a useful presence,” “a model and a liberator.” He told Ginsberg to pare down and economize, Roethke to open up, and encouraged Lowell and Levertov to shake off poetic conventions. But in all his emphasis on the poem as a made object of concrete physicality or as a field of action, he would return again and again to this basic advice to young writers: “The only thing necessary is to have something to say when at last the opportunity comes to say it.”

With the 1985 publication of Charles Tomlinson’s edition of Williams’s Selected Poems, New Directions introduced a gathering larger and more comprehensive than the original 1963 edition. Opening with Professor Tomlinson’s superbly clear and helpful introduction, this selection reflects the most up-to-date Williams scholarship. In addition to including many more poems, Tomlinson has organized the whole in chronological order. “It isn’t what he [the poet] says that counts as a work of art,” Williams maintained, “it’s what he makes, with such intensity of purpose that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.”

Long unavailable, The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams is now reissued as a New Directions Paperbook. Spanning fifty-four years (1902-56), this collection records the creative growth of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and versatile writers. Physician as well as poet and novelist, Williams stole time from his busy obstetric/pediatric practice in Rutherford, New Jersey, to correspond with many of the important literary figures of his day: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Nathanael West, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Burke, and Robert Lowell––to name only a few. In addition, his tender letters to his wife Floss and detailed medical letters to his son, Dr. Bill Jr., during World War II, show the devoted husband and father never too overworked or preoccupied to express his love and concern. From his first letters home while at the University of Pennsylvania to his last letters to a new generation of writers and critics, Williams is always candid and open, and frequently humorous, in his assessment of himself and others. And as he trenchantly criticizes the poetic establishment for its lack of receptivity to new writing and as he debates form, diction, and style with fellow writers, we can watch American poetry evolve from a mannered imitation of the nineteenth-century British masters to modernism in full-flower, presented in a distinctly American idiom.

Originally published in 1959, Yes Mrs. Williams has long been unavailable. In recalling one of the “determined women” in his life. William Carlos Williams, the quintessentially American poet of this century, does not write about his mother so much as recreate her. An experimentalist in prose as well as poetry, Williams records the “talk” of Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, capturing the contradictions of this Spanish-speaking, Puerto Rican-born, Parisian-trained artist turned New Jersey wile and mother, her strength and cantankerousness, her vitality and sense of failed purpose. For this first New Directions paperbook edition, Dr. William Eric Williams, son and grandson, has written an illuminating foreword that includes newly discovered Williams family letters.

Subtitled “The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet,” this unique volume was the result of a series of informal conversations in the mid-1950s between Dr. Williams, his wife, and Edith Heal, then a student at Columbia University. In the relaxed atmosphere of the Williams home in Rutherford, New Jersey, the three discussed, chronologically, the poet’s works as collected on his very own library shelves. “There was an air of discovery about the whole procedure,” Miss Heal writes in her introduction, “the poet’s excited ’Why I’d forgotten this dedication,’ the unexpected appearance of reviews that had been tucked away in the pages of the books, pencilled corrections in the text, scrawled first drafts on prescription blanks.” I Wanted to Write a Poem is, then, a brief “talking” bibliography, alive with the Williamses’ memories of the circumstances in which the books were brought into being––in Miss Heal’s words, “a nostalgic review of the early twentieth-century literary world.”

“Not after the establishment, but speaking straight ahead.” This is how William Carlos Williams referred to his own forthrightness as well as his practice of using only American speech patterns in his poems. In Interviews with William Carlos Williams, Linda Wagner of the English Department, Michigan State University, has assembled Dr. Williams’s most important public statements. The first section, entitled simply “Interviews,” reproduces in toto three in-depth conversations, revealing Dr. Williams’s humor, vitality, and American-ness, as he discusses his theories of poetic meter and diction, his opinions of such contemporaries as Pound and Eliot, and his view of his own role in shaping the course of modern American poetry. The second section, “Dialogues,” is arranged alphabetically by subject heading. Here are recorded the poet’s thoughts on topics from “Art” to “Women.” The third and final part of Interviews with William Carlos Williams, “Memoirs and Miscellany,” includes the touching account of a visit to the Williamses by artist Gael Turnbull in 1958. Also reprinted are two of Dr. Williams’s best expositions of his own poetic techniques, “The American Idiot” and “How to Write”––essays which appeared in early New Directions anthologies but have been generally unavailable since. This valuable collection of comments “for the record” is annotated and includes an index.

The miscellany of essays, notes, fragments, and jottings to which William Carlos Williams gave the title The Embodiment of Knowledge was found in manuscript after his death in the archive of his papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Written in 1928-30, and dedicated to his sons, it was intended as a concrete demonstration of the organic nature of education, to show that knowledge is an ongoing process by which we create our selves from day to day. And to underscore the fact that so many of his own books were extended works of self-exploration, Dr. Williams wrote on the cover of his manuscript: “to be printed as it is, faults and all.”

Imaginations makes accessible to the broad reading public five early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for Kora in Hell, have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms. Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express “the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.” The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing “The Great American Novel” in America … automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

William Carlos Williams was already developing and strengthening his American nativist position when Ezra Pound challenged him to close down his medical practice for a “sabbatical” in Europe. “I think you are afraid to take it,” Pound wrote, “for fear of destroying some illusions which you think necessary to your illusions.” Williams risked them and left for Paris. The itinerary of what Williams was to call his “magnificent year” forms the framework of A Voyage to Pagany. Its protagonist, young Dr. “Dev” Evans, from the “New Jersey town of P. where he was born,” is a tourist in Pagany––the name Williams chose for all Europe––glorying in its ancient monuments, its scientific, avant-garde and expatriate worlds, in its music and art and above all its people. Stimulated and bruised, he returns to America determined to discover what is genuinely poetic at home. The story is fictional but the character is the same Williams who went on to write In the American Grain, to celebrate in poetry and prose the American conscience and revitalize its tradition. In the Introduction, Harry Levin, the critic who has taken all literature since the Renaissance as his province, pinpoints A Voyage to Pagany in the development of Williams and in the mainstream of modem literature. He shows how Williams’s “spontaneous energy made him an especially responsive witness to the American-European encounter.”

William Carlos Williams’s place among the great poets of our century is firmly established. This anthology of selections drawn from the whole range of his work––poetry, fiction, autobiography, drama and essays––shows conclusively that his prose was also remarkably original, versatile and powerful. It has been edited by M. L. Rosenthal, literary critic and Professor of English at New York University.

Throughout his life, Dr. Williams tirelessly defended and promoted the best in modern literature and art. He contributed widely to leading literary magazines, wrote prefaces and introductions, and lectured at many universities. This selection represents his finest work in criticism. Much of it concerns poetry and poets––T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Karl Shapiro, E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Robert Lowell and many others. Williams also spoke out on painters and paintings as well as music and literature. There are essays on James Joyce, Shakespeare, Federico Garcia Lorca, the basis of faith in art, the American Revolution, H. L. Mencken’s The American Language, Ford Madox Ford, American primitive painters, Antheil’s music, and the work of Gertrude Stein.

The Build-up, Volume 3 of the Stecher Trilogy, picks up the thread of White Mule and In the Money. Although all of the novels deal with the triumphant rise of an immigrant family in the early 1900s, the Build-up is more concerned with the overwhelming drive and ambition of Joe Stecher’s wife, Gurlie. After years of hard work, careful planning (and his wife’s badgering) Joe’s printing business is providing his family with a comfortable income. As soon as her financial goal is realized, Gurlie focuses her attention on another area. Her phenomenal energy is soon earning her all unassailable position as a social leader in a small New Jersey suburb. Her achievement is not without its heartache, however. This story is told with all the gentle humor and exacting detail that mark Williams’s prose works.

First published by New Directions in 1940, In the Money is a sequel to White Mule, and the second volume in Dr. Williams’s “Stecher Trilogy," but it also stands alone as a novel complete in itself. White Mule is a study of childhood––of the baby Flossie Stecher and her sister Lottie, and their parents, Joe and Gurlie Stecher, of German and Norwegian origin, living in New York before the first World War. In the Money is Joe Stecher’s success story––the tale of his fight against graft and injustice to found his own business and get “into the money." Joe is by nature quiet and reserved. But his wife Gurlie is full of ambition and drives him on toward the things she wants––position and a home of her own. It is a simple story, yet a meaningful one––a typical American situation. As a novelist, one of Dr. Williams’s strengths is his striking use of detail, an “objectivism," related to the style of his poetry; which achieves great, even symbolic force in its enlargement of the minutiae of American life and character.

This collection makes available work of one of our greatest American poets in the last decade of his life. The first section, Pictures from Brueghel, contains previously uncollected short poems, while the second and third parts are the complete texts of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955), originally published by Random House. In these books, Dr. Williams perfected his “variable foot” metric and achieved full mastery of the “American idiom” which was his lifelong first concern. Among the poems of this period is the long “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” which W. H. Auden has called “one of the most beautiful love poems in the language.” Pictures from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry only two months after William Carlos Williams’ death on March 4, 1963.

Williams was foremost a poet, but the novels are of great interest. They are important books in their own right, because they present with a poet’s insight, and in a prose style of striking originality, aspects of American life which few other writers have approached. White Mule and its sequels, In the Money and The Build-Up, form a trilogy, the saga of the Stecher family, but each volume is a complete novel by itself. Joe Stecher and Gurlie, his wife, are a young couple of European origin settled in New York at the turn of the century and working to make a place for themselves in the new world. White Mule is the story of Joe’s inner struggle between love of fine craftsmanship (he is a printer by trade) and Gurlie’s ambition to get ahead, to have him get “in the money.” But it also the story of the awakening consciousness of their children; the real heroine is the baby Flossie––she had a kick like “White Mule” whiskey––whose birth begins the book. Everything revolves around the baby and she is surely unique in literature. Dr. Williams was a pediatrician, and without sentimentality he makes of this little being, who cannot even talk, a full-scale, three-dimensional personality.

William Carlos Williams’s medical practice and his literary career formed an undivided life. For forty years he was a busy doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, and yet he was able to write more than thirty books. One of the finest chapters in this Autobiography tells how each of his two roles stimulated and supported the other. We meet in these pages many of Williams’s friends: he writes with discerning frankness of the poets H.D., Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore; of the artists Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Charles Sheeler, and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; and there are fine portraits of the writers who congregated in Paris in the Twenties: Joyce, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. The Autobiography is an unpretentious book; it reads much as Williams talked––spontaneously and often with a special kind of salty humor. But it is a very human story, glowing with warmth and sensitivity. It brings us close to a rare man and lets us share his affectionate concern for the people to whom he ministered, body and soul, through a long rich life as physician and writer.

For this volume, originally published in cloth in 1961, William Carlos Williams collected, and revised, four full-length plays and the libretto of an opera on George Washington. As might be expected of the man who did most in our time to create a new and truly “American” idiom for poetry, Dr. Williams’ writing for the stage challenges producers and actors to extend the range of modern drama. Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York’s famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba’s Children, written three years before Arthur Miller’s Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting – the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950’s. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.

For forty-two years the poet William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician in a typical American town in New Jersey. And, as Van Wyck Brooks points out in his introduction to this collection of Dr. Williams’ stories, the doctor “did not treat a man [only] as something to which surgery and drugs applied” but “as material for a work of art.” This point of view produced a dozen or more stories which are true masterpieces, and in all of Williams’ stories there is a vitality and an immediacy unique in American fiction. This volume gathers together fifty-two stories from earlier books, The Knife of the Times (1932), Life Along the Passaic River (1938), and Make Light of It (1950), and includes as well the great long story, The Farmers’ Daughters, completed in 1956.

A rich compendium of translations, The New Directions Anthology of Chinese Poetry is the first collection to look at Chinese poetry through its enormous influence on American poetry. Beginning with Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915), the anthology includes translations by three other major U.S. poets––William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder––and an important poet-translator-scholar, David Hinton, all of whom have long been associated with New Directions. It is one of the first general anthologies ever to consider the process of translation by presenting different versions of the same poem by multiple translators, as well as examples of the translators rewriting themselves. A playful and instructive study into the art and tradition of Chinese poetry, this anthology gathers some 250 poems by nearly 40 poets, from the anonymous early poetry through the great masters of the T’ang and Sung dynasties. It also includes previously uncollected translations by Pound; a selection of essays on Chinese poetry by all five translators, some never published before in book form; Lu Chi’s famous “Rhymeprose on Literature,” translated by the eminent scholar Achilles Fang; biographical notes that are a collage of poems and comments by both the American translators and the Chinese poets themselves; as well as Eliot Weinberger’s excellent introduction that historically contextualizes the influence Chinese poetry has had on the work of American poets.