American poet who practiced medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, for more than forty years and wrote poems and prose between house calls. Williams's central commitment was to an American poetry rooted in American speech, American materials, and the local — a position he held against Pound's and Eliot's expatriate cosmopolitanism. He read The Waste Land (1922) as a catastrophe for the project he cared about: it returned American poetry, he thought, to the European library at the moment American poetry was finally finding its own ground.
The early lyrics — "The Red Wheelbarrow," "This Is Just to Say," "Spring and All" — perform what Williams meant by "no ideas but in things": attention to the particular as the only path to whatever generality a poem can earn. Spring and All (1923), the volume that contained those lyrics interleaved with prose manifesto, is the major early statement. The long poem Paterson (1946–1958), in five books, is the late ambition: a poem of an American place built out of letters, newspaper clippings, historical documents, and lyric, on the model Pound had given in the Cantos but turned to local rather than universal-historical purpose.
Williams's late discovery of the variable foot — the three-step line of The Desert Music (1954) and Journey to Love (1955) — produced some of the most quietly moving poems in American English. Through Allen Ginsberg, who was his neighbor and protégé, his influence shaped the Beats and, through them, much of postwar American poetry's commitment to vernacular speech and the open form.