William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician who lived from 1883 to 1963 and is closely associated with modernism and imagism. He built his poetry from the speech and scenes of everyday American life, and short poems such as This Is Just to Say and The Red Wheelbarrow remain among his best known. His long five-volume poem Paterson, published between 1946 and 1958, takes the city of Paterson, New Jersey as its subject. Other poems respond to the visual arts, and one of them, The Great Figure, inspired a painting by Charles Demuth. He kept up a medical career as a pediatrician and general practitioner alongside his writing, and he won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems.