William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (17 September 1883 – 4 March 1963) wrote plays, novels, essays, short stories, and especially poetry. His primary occupation though was as a physician, both general medicine and pediatrics. Work all day, write all night.

 

His mother was a painter and paintings influenced Williams’s writing. Besides individual poems connected with paintings, Williams wrote a book called Pictures from Brueghel, written pictures of the artist’s paintings. Even poems not associated with specific pictures still brought a vivid image to mind. In fact, his early work was of the Imagist movement before he abandoned it for Modernism.

 

The Red Wheelbarrow

 

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens.

 

 

Throughout his life he maintained close friendships with artists and writers such as Man Ray, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Marcel Duchamp, and Charles Demuth. In a turnabout, Williams wrote the poem The Great Figure, inspiring Demuth to create a painting “I saw the figure 5 in gold.”

 

The Great Figure

 

Among the rain

and lights

I saw the figure 5

in gold

on a red

firetruck

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city.