William Carlos Williams was a renowned modernist American poet, who also just happened to be a general doctor and a pediatrician, who famously said he worked harder at the former than the latter. He lived, wrote and practiced in New Jersey, and always felt the need for a specifically fresh American voice, in opposition to what he saw as a tired and elitist tradition from Great Britain and Europe. His many works earned several prizes (many posthumous) and are widely anthologized. He would very likely have had more fame as a poet if a certain Thomas Stearns Eliot hadn’t published The Wasteland just a year before Williams’ own seminal work, Spring and All. He was certainly enough of a modernist to recognize the value of young Allen Ginsberg, for whose Howl and Other Poems he wrote the introduction in 1956. Williams was a mentor and figure of respect to many of the “beat†poets of the period – somehow one cannot imagine Mr. Eliot in that position!
