William Carlos Williams - Physician Poet

William Carlos Williams was my artistic mentor and teacher of my own main guide to poetry, Denise Levertov. He taught a generation how to write a truly American poetry.

William Carlos W or Poet/M.D.?

In the last century, there is one American poet who stands above the rest.? William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) lived an outwardly ordinary life, but in his journeys of the imagination created the form and subject of 20th century American poetry.? It was ultimately not Wallace Stevens with his crystalline images nor Ezra Pound with his symphonic sounds, but Williams who struggled and was midwife to a truly American, a truly democratic, modern poetry.

?Williams was a physician and a poet.? He lived both lives simultaneously and with savage intensity.? He practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, among the poor and working-class inhabitants of this faded industrial town.? He saw by his count a million and a half patients and delivered 2,000 babies in his active medical years between 1910 and 1961.

?He wrote in his autobiography:

?Time meant nothing to me.? I might be in the middle of some flu epidemic, the phone ringing day and night, madly, not a moment free.? That made no?difference… Five minutes, ten minutes can?always be found.? I had my typewriter in my office desk.? All I had to do was pull up the leaf…and I was ready to go. I worked at top speed.? If a patient came in the door while I was in the middle of a sentence, bang would go the machine—I was a physician.? When the last patient had been put to bed, I would always find time to bang out 10 or 12 pages.? In fact, I couldn’t rest until I had freed my mind from the obsessions which had been tormenting me all day…

Having scribbled, I could rest.

?He found no mystery in his role as doctor and poet and when questioned about it in an interview in 1932 with The New York Herald Tribune said that it was not particularly unusual.? Chekhov had been doctor…and Oliver Wendell Holmes…and Keats.? It was, he explained, a natural reaction to turn from materialism of medicine to the imaginative world of literature.

Williams has had a powerful influence on several generations of poets and intellectuals.? Among these is Robert Coles, M.D., in my mind, the most profound medical humanist writing today.? Coles was headed for a career in teaching when he met Williams in the early 1950s and then changes his direction to medical school.? While Coles was struggling with his medical training an ailing Williams encouraged him with comments like these:? “Look, you’re not out on a four-year picnic at that medical school, so stop talking like a disappointed lover.? You signed up for a period of training and they’re dishing it out to you, and all you can do is take everything they’ve got, everything they hand out to you, and tell yourself how lucky you are to be on the receiving end so you can be a doctor, and that’s no bad price to pay for the worry, the exhaustion.”

His son, William Eric Williams, M.D. recounts the intensity of his life in poetry and medicine.? Williams kept a small red notebook in which he kept his public health records as school doctor but also recorded the sharp images he later turned to poetry in the heat of the night.? One such prescription for himself:

?

???????????????????????????? If I did not have

???????????????????????????????????????? verse

??????????????????????????? I would have died

??????????????????????????? or been

??????????????????????????? a thief

?

?

???????????????????????????? (or)

?

???????????????????????????? so much depends

???????????????????????????? upon

?

???????????????????????????? a red wheel

???????????????????????????? barrow

?

???????????????????????????? glazed with rain

???????????????????????????? water

?

???????????????????????????? beside the white

???????????????????????????? chickens

?

Although his family undoubtedly suffered for this dual profession, the recollections of his son demonstrate a sympathy with his driven father.? “It was at night that he would call on his apparently endless stores of energy, the tattoo of his typewriter providing reassuring lullaby to which my brother Paul and I slept and awoke throughout childhood.?? I can recall the projection of his mood brought to me by the cadence of keys—the smooth andante when all was happy and serene, the interrupted staccato when the going got rough, the carriage slamming, the paper ripped from the roller, balled and heaved in the direction of the wastebasket. Night was time to roar.”

?

The ultimate reason Williams has prevailed as the major figure in twentieth century poetry is not his skill with words but his love and understanding of the ordinary people in one ordinary place, Paterson, New Jersey.? This understanding is inextricably bound to his role as their physician and friend.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

?

Williams most beautiful poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”, a long love poem to

his wife, Floss, was written at the finale of his struggle to create a new American meter, the variable foot. (an excerpt)

?

?

Of Asphodel, that greeny flower,

????????????? ?????????? I come, my sweet,

????????????? ?????????????? to sing to you!?

?

?????????????

????????????? My heart rouses

????????????? ????????? Thinking to bring you news

????????????? ??????????????? of something

?

????????????? that concerns you

??????????????????????? and concerns many men. Look at

????????????????????????????? what passes for the new.???????????????????????????

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

????????????? You will not find it there but in

????????????? ????????? despised poems.

???????????????????????????? ???? It is difficult

?

????????????? to get news from poems

??????????????????????? yet men die miserably every day

?????????????? for lack

?

????????????? of what is found there.

????????????? ????????? Hear me out

????????????????????????????? For I too am concerned

?????????????

and every man

??????????????????????who wants to die at peace

??????????????? in his bed besides.

?Materials presented above were reproduced from various books by William Carlos Williams with the kind permission of the publisher, New Directions Publishing Corporation.? Dr. Larrabee presented this essay as part of a poetry reading put together by physicians and presented at Swedish Hospital.? Another reference was a Williams’ biography A New World Naked, by Paul Marian published by Norton Press.