Poet, Physician
Born: Sept. 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey
Died: March 4, 1963, in Rutherford, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2009: Arts & Letters

William Carlos Williams loved being a medical doctor. His profession allowed him to make house calls and talk to people about their lives, often arousing his social consciousness and inspiring the poems that made him an important figure in American letters.

Williams’ father, an Englishman, was raised mostly in the Dominican Republic. His mother was of French extraction, but hailed from Puerto Rico. After moving to Rutherford, the couple maintained Spanish as the dominant language in their household and Caribbean culture was central to their son’s upbringing.

Williams received his early education in Rutherford, but also attended schools in Geneva and Paris. He earned his high school degree at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, New York, and was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. After receiving his medical degree, he studied pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany. Returning stateside, Williams married in 1912, put down roots in Rutherford, and opened his practice as a pediatrician and family doctor. All the while, Williams was writing poetry. His first collection, titled “Poems,” was published in 1909. A second book of poems, “The Tempers,” arrived in 1912.

Throughout his career, Williams practiced medicine by day and wrote poems at night. Along with Ezra Pound, a friend from his college days, Williams became a foremost figure in what is known as Imagism, a movement in poetry away from flowery romanticism toward simpler and more vivid writing. He also broke from traditional poetic structures, writing in free form with his own sense of rhythm and line breaks.

Williams wrote in ordinary language of ordinary Americans as he observed the people around him in everyday situations. His works included “Paterson,” an epic of poetry and prose published in five volumes from 1946 to 1958. “Paterson,” which began as an 85-line poem in 1926, documented Williams’ trips from Rutherford to the nearby industrial city of Paterson, where he wandered the streets and sat in parks catching snippets of conversations.
Among Williams’ other famous works are “This Is Just To Say,” a 28-word poem written in free form as an apology for eating the reader’s plums; and “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a cryptic, 16-word description of a rustic scene (possibly inspired by a Passaic backyard).

Williams was prolific in both of his careers. In addition to his steady flow of poems, he wrote novels, essays, plays and autobiographical works. As for his medical practice, it is estimated he delivered as many as 2,000 babies in Rutherford.
Generous with his time, Williams was a mentor to fellow poet Allen Ginsberg, who grew up in Paterson. He was a major influence on Ginsberg and other Beat Generation writers, as well as latter-day poet/songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen and Debbie Harry. Williams was the winner of the first National Book Award for poetry in 1949 and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1953. In 1963, he was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Williams’ house, at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford, was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.