William Carlos Williams

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Passport photo of William Carlos Williams from 1921

William Carlos Williams (born September 17, 1883 in Rutherford , New Jersey , † March 4, 1963 ibid) was an American doctor and poet .

Life

WCW , as it is often abbreviated, spent almost his entire life - apart from his trips to Europe - in his hometown of Rutherford in New Jersey, where he also practiced as a doctor ( MD ) since 1910 .

After graduating from school in Rutherford in 1897, he first attended a school near Geneva for two years and then the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. Back in New York, he continued his studies and joined the writing avant-garde .

He made friends with Ezra Pound while studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania . He later became the most important poet of American modernity with him (and TS Eliot ) . In contrast to Pound, who followed European models, WCW, in his collection of essays In the American Grain (1925), called for simple, yet avant-garde poetry that should be based on the spoken language and the American everyday world. The friendship with Pound was always based on this marked contrast between the views of the two poets and their different emphases. WCW writes in his autobiography: “Ezra has always been very careful to bridge the gap between my educational gaps and his sovereign scholarship. Since he is by no means patronizing me here, I take it easy. I genuinely grieve that my literary knowledge is so inferior to his. I respect his discomfort and try my best to adjust to his well-intentioned endeavors. ”If WCW was less familiar with European literature than Pound, he endeavored to remedy this deficiency on his trip to Europe, as he mainly lived in Paris met with well-known European writers, intellectuals and painters. On the other hand, WCW ridiculed Pound's attempts to distinguish himself as an opera composer. WCW says of these experiments: "In my opinion, Ezra, like WB Yeats, cannot distinguish one tone from another." He believed that Pound's interest in opera was based more on his keen sense of rhythm.

In 1909 WCW traveled to Leipzig for further medical training. From October 18, 1909 to March 1, 1910, he was enrolled at the Medical Faculty of the Saxon University and attended lectures on his later specialty, paediatrics . In his lecture-free time he got to know Leipzig and the surrounding area by bicycle and devoted himself to European literature. He saw Schiller's dramas and reported: I read Heine and Sudermann's “Frau Sorge” and his “Johannisfeuer” with enthusiasm .

Al Que Quiere! , so-called Ding-Lyrik from 1917. The title can with The One Who Will! to be translated. Williams alludes to the fact that as a poet he is looking for like-minded people.

His early poems are still strongly influenced by European Dadaism and Surrealism . In 1923 he wrote his best-known poem This is Just to Say . Together with Pound and Eliot, he joined the Imagists , an Anglo-American literary movement , around 1912 . His friendship with Pound later broke up due to artistic disagreements and Pound's support for Italian fascism , but this did not prevent him from visiting Pound, who was interned in the USA (see autobiography).

In 1927, on his European tour, WCW visited Gertrude Stein's salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris. The two innovators of the American language appreciate each other and share their love for painting. Back in the USA, he published an essay on the revolutionary power of the word in Stein.

As a result of his third stroke in October 1955, he suffered paralysis, which slowed his work pace. Still, he taught himself to type on an electric typewriter with his non-paralyzed hand.

William Carlos Williams died in Rutherford, New Jersey, in March 1963, at the age of 79, after another series of severe strokes.

influence

An "objectivist" anthology was published in 1932 under the direction of William Carlos Williams' minimalist school. It also includes the poets George Oppen , Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky . The poems should represent an independent and specific structural unit and should not allow the symbolic or emotional subtext or the intention of the author.

Library Walk New York: "The rose fades, and is renewed again ...."

The epic poem about the city of Paterson in New Jersey, originally published in five volumes between 1946 and 1958, is considered Williams' masterpiece . Williams' Paterson plays an important role in Jim Jarmusch's film Paterson .

In 1955 he wrote the foreword to the first edition of a poem by the then unknown author and poet from this very town - to Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl . Williams was a major influence on some of the Beat Generation writers . He wrote about Harold Norse that he was one of the best poets of his generation . In his equally masterful narratives, Williams' experiences as a doctor in rural America often form the background to the often relatively short, precise and poetic texts.

Stephen King prefers his chapters with five quotations from Paterson in his novel ES (1986) , thereby underlining both his literary reference to WCW and his continuation of the explorations into the American soul.

Awards

In 1950 he was awarded the National Book Award , posthumously in 1963 the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry ( Pictures from Brueghel ). In 1950 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Translations

  • Last Nights of Paris (1929) - A Dadaist novel translated from the French by his friend Philippe Soupault .
  • By Word of Mouth: Poems from the Spanish, 1916-1959 (2011) - Poetry from Spanish and Latin American.

Works (selection)

Charles Demuth's The Figure 5 in Gold (1928) is inspired by the poem The Great Figure .
  • The Tempers (1913)
  • Poems (1909-1917)
  • Al Que Quiere! (1917)
  • Poems (1918-1921)
  • Sour Grapes (1921)
  • The Great Figure (1921)
  • Spring and All (1923)
  • The Great American Novel (1923)
  • Poems (1922-1928)
  • In the American grain (1925)
  • The Descent of Winter (1928)
  • A voyage to Pagany (1928)
  • Poems (1929-1935)
  • An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935)
  • Adam & Eve & the City (1936)
  • Poems (1936-1939)
  • The Wedge (1944)
  • The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954)
  • Journey to Love (1955)
  • Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962)

In German language

literature

  • James Guimond: The art of William Carlos Williams: a discovery and possession of America , University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1968, ISBN 0-252-72449-6 .
  • Mike Weaver: William Carlos Williams: the American background , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971, ISBN 0-521-08072-X .
  • Peter Schmidt: William Carlos Williams, the arts, and literary tradition , Louisiana University Press, Baton Rouge, 1988, ISBN 0-8071-1406-5 .
  • Stefan Noa: “There's a lot of bastards out there!” Nationality and internationality in the works of William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg , Cuvillier, Göttingen, 2005, ISBN 3-86537-591-X .
  • Theo Breuer : From the hinterland. Poetry after 2000 . Edition YE, Sistig / Eifel 2005, ISBN 3-87512-186-4 .
  • Herbert Leibowitz: "Something urgent I have to say to you": the life and works of William Carlos Williams , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, ISBN 978-0-374-11329-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ William Carlos Williams: The autobiography (in: Selected works in individual editions ). Translated by Werner Schmitz. Hanser Verlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-446-17848-1 , pp. 310-311.
  2. ^ William Carlos Williams: The Autobiography . Hanser Verlag, Munich 1994, p. 306.
  3. ^ Klaus Schuhmann: Leipzig transit. A foray into the history of literature . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-936522-88-X , p. 59ff.
  4. ↑ This is Just To Say
  5. ^ Paul Mariani: William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked. Trinity University Press 2016. p. 301.
  6. ^ The individual volumes appeared in 1946, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1958; In 1963 she appeared in a band - along with fragments of Volume 6. It is in Paterson not a collection of poems, but in Williams words, a single long poem ( "long poem"). See: William Carlos William: Paterson , revised edition, ed. by Christopher McGowan, New York 1995, pp. IX-XV
  7. ^ Members: William Carlos Williams. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 4, 2019 (with information on awards).
personal data
SURNAME Williams, William Carlos
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic, poet and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 17th September 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Rutherford, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH March 4th 1963
Place of death Rutherford, New Jersey