POETRY REMAINS A PERIPHERAL ART FORM whose relevance to everyday life is not well understood. William Carlos Williams bridged that gap by insisting that the language of poetry should be the same as the language people used everyday, and in so doing he played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth-century American poetry. He believed poetry could show simple language to be capable of fresh expression and open to the conveyance of new thoughts and ways of thinking. Such was poetry’s importance to Williams that from the date of his first publication in 1909 to his last in 1962, most of his life as a writer existed in tandem with his full-time career as a pediatrician serving the environs of Rutherford, Passaic, and Paterson, New Jersey. In 1948, soon after retiring from his medical practice, he suffered the first of a series of debilitating strokes that for the next fifteen years forced him to fight to complete his other life-work of writing poetry. The social relevance of pediatrics, unlike poetry, needs no explanation, and yet Williams fought tooth and nail to outlast both the demands of his medical career and the illnesses that threatened to silence him, so he could finish saying all he felt he had in him to say. My purpose in this book is to achieve a better understanding of what compelled Williams to make poetry so central to his life and what hopes he had for it. Why did poetry matter to him and why should it still matter to others? In offering answers to these questions I look at the ethics that informed Williams’s poetry throughout his life, and I do so first by attending to the impact of Williams’s religious background, which is mostly ignored in studies of his life and work. Both Williams and his brother Edgar were raised as Unitarians by their parents, and William remained loyal to and supportive of the religion until his death, while continuing to denounce religions that looked beyond earthly reality and instead held out the promise of heaven as the real goal of life.

The link between Williams and Unitarianism also allows me to address a central concern of this book, the Emersonian nature of Williams’s writing.