美国文学 William Carlos Williams.pptx

William Carlos Williams （1883-1963）;Life and career;Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement through his friendships with Pound and H.D. (whom he also befriended at the University of Pennsylvania), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs. In 1915 Williams began to associate with a group of New York artists and writers known as The Others. Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and the artist Man Ray, this group included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore and Marcel Duchamp. ;A few years later, Williams published one of his seminal books of poetry, Spring and All, which contained the classic poems By the road to the contagious hospital, The Red Wheelbarrow, and To Elsie. However, in 1922, the year before Williams published Spring and All, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land which became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williamss very different brand of poetic Modernism. In his Autobiography, Williams would later write, I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and Im sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit. And although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliots highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature. Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English. ; In his later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had an especially significant in