M. L. Rosenthal (1994)

His Autobiography (New York, 1951) is partly devoted to the medical side of his life and its crucial relation to his poetry--which, like his fiction, draws heavily on his experience as a doctor. His working-class patients, especially the women, whose babies he delivered and whose hardy courage he vastly admired, absorbed his sympathetic if sometimes irritated attention much as Chekhov's peasant patients did his. They were of a different order of ethnic and class background, often, from the essentially middle-class world of Rutherford where he had spent his childhood and where he settled after his marriage to Florence Herman, the 'Floss' of his poems, who also appears in his plays and is the central figure of his novel White Mule (1937)--the first in a trilogy based on the lives of her Swedish mother and German father as immigrants in America.

 

 

Williams has gradually emerged as one of the great forces in twentieth-century American verse. His experiments, though striking, may have lacked the brilliance of Pound's and Eliot's at their best, and they may lack the elegance of Wallace Stevens in Harmonium or The Auroras of Autumn. But Williams's work is more expressive of American sensibility, and more saturated with American speech and its rhythms, than any poet's since Whitman. For these reasons he has entered the bloodstream of later American poetry: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Paul Blackburn, and many others show strong traces of his influence. (And indeed his poetry has also cast a net of 'Americanization' overseas, in the form of some poets' stylistic reorientation. We find writers like Charles Tomlinson and John Montague, for example, reflecting this influence while adapting it to their own countries' colloquial turns and poetic traditions.)

 

 

Robert Frost, of course, rivals Williams in his use of the native idiom--his poems are true to the speech and the trapped psyches of the New England country-people he knew; the dark elegiac and tragic strains running through so much of what he wrote carry it far beyond mere pastoral charm. Williams, however, expresses the whole nation's character, and especially its urban volatility: its multiracial and immigrant streams of speech and behaviour, its violence and exuberance, its ignorance of its own general and regional history. His important sequence Paterson, published serially between 1946 and 1961 in five 'Books' and part of a sixth, is an exploration of all these matters. It is presented as a search for the elements of a 'common language': a shared cultural and historical awareness to counteract the fragmentation of American society. Williams saw this fragmentation as a pressure for 'divorce' (i.e., inability to connect or communicate), not only between the sexes but among the people at large.

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Over the last few years Williams has suddenly become popular, not only in the avant-garde circles but in the academic world, in college courses in American Literature.  Students find themselves to his hopelessly human view of things, and teachers discover that the poems lend themselves marvelously to analysis and interpretation (xi).

Linda Wagner-Martin also remarks that "the writings of William Carlos Williams are a nearly inexhaustible reservoir of twentieth-century American themes and images, given ｅxpression through a voice unique in the history of literature (6).

--- Paul Ruben (2011)