Williams was born in
Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. His father, William George Williams, was born in England but raised from "a very young age" in the
Dominican Republic and "was most comfortable speaking in Spanish, which was the primary language spoken in the Williams's New Jersey household"; his mother, Raquel Hélène Hoheb, from
Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, was of French extraction. Williams's maternal grandmother was named Emily Dickinson, though she was no relation to
the poet of that name. Scholars note that the Caribbean culture of the family home had an important influence on Williams. Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera observes, "English was not his primary means of communication until he was a teenager. At home his mother and father—who were raised in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively—spoke Spanish with each other and to young William Carlos." While he wrote in English, "the poet's first language" was Spanish and his "consciousness and social orientation" were shaped by Caribbean customs; his life influenced "to a very important degree by a plural cultural foundation."
John Keats and
Walt Whitman were important early influences on Williams. Upon leaving Penn, Williams did internships at both
French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York, then went to
Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics. Shortly afterward, his second book of poems,
The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend
Ezra Pound, whom he had met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1914, Williams and his wife had their first son, William E. Williams, followed by their second son, Paul H. Williams, in 1917. William E. also became a physician. Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. His work has a great affinity with painting, in which he had a lifelong interest. In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the
Imagist movement through his friendships with Pound and
H.D. (whom he had befriended during his medical studies at Penn), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his style changed to express his commitment to a modernist expression of his immediate environment. He was influenced by the "inarticulate poems" of his patients. The
Dada artist and poet
Baroness Elsa criticized Williams's sexual and artistic politics in her experimental prose poem review titled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'", published in
The Little Review in March 1921. Williams had an affair with the Baroness, and published three poems in
Contact, describing the forty-year-old as "an old lady" with "broken teeth [and] syphilis". In 1923, Williams published
Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, which contained the classics "By the road to the contagious hospital", "
The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie". However, in 1922, the publication of
T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land had become a literary sensation that overshadowed Williams's very different brand of poetic
modernism. In his
Autobiography, Williams later wrote of "the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land." Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English. During the 1930s, Williams began working on an opera. Titled
The First President, it was focused on
George Washington and his influence on the history of the United States of America and was intended to "galvanize us into a realization of what we are today." As a lifelong radical democrat, Williams often collaborated with left-wing and anti-fascist circles and magazines, particularly during the
Great Depression. In
Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of
Paterson, New Jersey, Williams wrote his own modern epic poem, focusing on "the local" on a wider scale than he had previously attempted. He also examined the role of the poet in American society and famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and repeated again and again in
Paterson). In his later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had a significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s, including the
Beat movement, the
San Francisco Renaissance, the
Black Mountain school, and the
New York School. One of Williams's more dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jersey poet
Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in
Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's first book,
Howl and Other Poems in 1956. Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948, and after 1949, a series of strokes. Severe depression after one such stroke caused him to be confined to Hillside Hospital, New York, for four months in 1953. He died on March 4, 1963, at age 79 at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in
Lyndhurst, New Jersey. ==Poetry==