William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He studied medicine at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His poetry was influenced by Ezra Pound with whom he was one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement. He experimented with meter and lineation and is regarded as one of the founders of free verse. Williams brought an entirely fresh and genuinely American voice to 20th-century poetry. His subject matter was the everyday circumstances of the life of ordinary people. He continued to practise as a doctor for the whole of his life.
They call me and I go. It is a frozen road past midnight, a dust of snow caught in the rigid wheeltracks. The door opens. I smile, enter and shake off the cold. Here is a great woman on her side in the bed. She is sick, perhaps vomiting, perhaps laboring to give birth to a tenth child. Joy! Joy! Night is a room darkened for lovers, through the jalousies the sun has sent one gold needle! I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
Collected Poems 1909–1939, Vol. 1, © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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