William Carlos Williams
Further reading and study: Williams's poems have only in recent years been fully collected, in two big voumes: Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by A. Walton Litz and Christopher McGowan, and Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939-1962, edited by Christopher McGowan, both published by New Directions. Available in New Directions paperbacks are many of Williams's individual works, including his last volume of poems, P ictures from Brueghel (1962), and his "epic" of Paterson, New Jersey, called Paterson (1963). New Directions also keeps all of Williams's novels (four of them) in print, as well as a collection of his fascinating short stories (called The Farmer's Daughters) and a collection of his plays (Many Loves and Other Plays). Some of his remarkable essays, not all of them on poetry, are in Selected Essays (1954), and his imaginative history of America--one of the best things he wrote--called In the American Grain (1925) is a key text for further study of Williams's work. Imaginations (1970) is a collection of Williams's most experimental writings, including the prose/poetry Spring and All and his Great American Novel, actually an anti-novel. Williams talks a lot about his poems in I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958), and he talks more about them in a collection of interviews, edited by Linda Wagner, and called, appropriately en ough, Interviews with William Carlos Williams (1976). As all of this suggests, Williams wrote a great deal, and he wrote in just about every genre and combination of genres: novels, short poems, long poems, short stroies, essays, opera librettos, plays, and assorted uncategorizable things.
Williams wrote a long autobiography, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951); his Selected Letters (1957) were edited by J.C. Thirlwell, and his complete letters are still in the process of being edited. The best biography is Paul Mariani's long and fascinating William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981), available in paperback. Reed Whittemore's shorter William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975) is less satisfying but a quicker read.
There is a lot of criticism on Williams, including many book-length studies (even book-length studies about individual poems!). The best overview is still James E. Breslin's William Carlos Williams: An American Artist (1970); other useful earlier studies include Thomas Whitaker's William Carlos Williams (1968) and James Guimond's The Art of William Carlos' Williams (1968). Sherman Paul's The Music of Survival (1968) is a "biography" of one of Williams's greatest poems ("Desert Music"). J. Hillis Miller edited a fine collection of essays about Williams, William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966), which contains some of the classic statements about Williams by Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Lowell; Miller also has a fine chapter on Williams in his book called Poets of Reality (1966). Mike Weaver's William Carlos Williams: The American Background (1971) looks at various sources for Williams's art, and Stephen Tapscott's American Beauty: William Carlos Williams and the Modernist Whitman (1984) investigates Whitman's influence on Williams. One of the most ch allenging recent studies of Williams is Bernard Duffey's Poetry of Presence: The Writing of William Carlos Williams (1986). A good collection of recent criticism about Williams is Stephen Gould Axelrod and Helen Deese, eds., Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams (1995).
A lot of the most interesting work on Williams focuses on his relationship to painting and photography: see Dickran Tashjian's William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920-1940, William Marling's William Carlos Williams and the Painters, 1909-1923 (1982), and Henry Sayre's Visual Text of William Carlos Williams (1983); Bram Dijkstra initiated this kind of study of Williams with The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1969). Recently critics have shown an increased interest in the relationship of literature and medicine in Williams's writings: see T. Hugh Crawford, Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams (1993) and Brian Bremen, William Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Cultu re (1993).
Electronic Resources
The Web resources on Williams are still quite limited. The following pages take you to some sites where you can get modest biographical and bibliographical information, and where you can access some of his poems and stories online.
The best portal page to Williams material on the web is the Academy of American Poets site, available here.
A wonderful, large collection of recordings of Williams reading his own poems is located here.
The Modern American Poetry website also has a wealth of commentary, biography, and links, available here.
The Voices and Visions series has a Williams site, where you can watch a replay of the animated version of "The Great Figure" poem that you saw in the video, available here.
The William Carlos Williams Review has a webpage, with a very full bibliography of work done on Williams and with a number of critical essays available online here.
For paintings by Pieter Bruegel (to look at while reading Williams's Pictures from Brueghel), go to this site, and look under the Artist Index for Pieter Bruegel the Elder; links will take you to a gallery of his paintings where you can find the paintings on which Williams based his poems.