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Physician-Poet William Carlos Williams–“No Ideas But In Things”
STAMP VIGNETTE ON MEDICAL SCIENCE
Physician-Poet William Carlos Williamse“No Ideas But In Things” David P. Steensma, MD; Marc A. Shampo, PhD; and Robert A. Kyle, MD
M
ost physician-writers have either been unsuccessful practitioners (eg, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, Anton Chekhov) or have given up clinical work as soon as they achieved a modicum of literary success. William Carlos Williams managed to weave medical practice and writing into a seamless whole for decades, although this was often difficult e especially during the Second World War, when he was in his 60s and many younger physicians had been called away for military service. Biographer Linda WagnerMartin wrote that Williams “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician,” yet he famously delivered more than 2,000 babies, made innumerable house calls to the working-class triple-decker “Bayonne boxes” of Northern New Jersey, and served for 17 years as Chief Pediatrician for the Passaic General Hospital (now St. Mary’s Hospital) in Passaic, New Jersey. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. His middle name, “Carlos,” reflects the Puerto Rican origin of his mother; his father was English and grew up in the West Indies before moving to New Jersey. After attending schools in Rutherford, Geneva, and Paris, Williams graduated from Horace Mann (High) School in New York City in 1902, and, after taking a special examination, was admitted at age 19 to the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school without formal undergraduate work. At Penn, Williams met poet Ezra Pound, who greatly influenced his later work, as well as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), a Bryn Mawr student whose father was a professor of astronomy (and who was briefly engaged to the much-older Pound, despite Williams’ affections for her). Pound promoted a Modernist aesthetic, fostered the career of young artists including Williams and H.D., and was the leading proponent of the Imagist movement in poetry, which stressed precise, clear, and spare economical language at the expense of meter, rhyme, and formal structure.
Williams’ medical career was spent as a general practitioner with a focus on pediatrics and neonatology. His first internship was at the French Hospital in Manhattan, where the work was grueling; his second, a pediatrics internship at the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital between 1908 and 1909, came to an abrupt end when he refused hospital administrators’ request to sign hospital bills without providing services. He then went to Europe and studied for a year in Leipzig, visiting Pound in London and touring the European continent before returning home to set up a practice in his hometown of Rutherford. Williams married Florence “Flossie” Herman in 1912 (after Flossie’s older sister had refused a marriage proposal), with whom he had two sons. Williams’ first book, Poems, was published in 1909 and sold just four copies, but, encouraged by Pound and by an internal drive e “I think all writing is a disease; you can’t stop it” e he continued to write. “My first poem was a bolt from the blue . it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. it filled me with soul satisfying joy.” His second book, The Tempest, was promoted by Pound and was much more successful than Poems; this work resulted in wider recognition of Williams’ talents and introductions to many New York-based artists. In contrast to the highly erudite and formal style of his Modernist contemporary, T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land was published in 1922 (much to Williams’ chagrin, as he felt Eliot’s work was not only a setback for Modernism, but also overshadowed his own efforts), Williams always wrote in ordinary language. “The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic”, summed up his philosophy. He claimed, “I don’t speak English, but the American idiom. I don’t know how to write anything else, and I refuse to learn.” Marianne Moore, who shared Williams’ dislike of esoteric literary allusions in writing and the constraints
Mayo Clin Proc. n April 2014;89(4):e35-e36 n http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.04.035 www.mayoclinicproceedings.org n ª 2014 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research
From Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (D.P.S.), and Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (M.A.S., R.A.K.).
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MAYO CLINIC PROCEEDINGS
of traditional poetic forms, described Williams’ poetic language as, “plain American which cats and dogs can read.” Vivid imagery characterizes Williams’ best poems e he coined the phrase, “no ideas but in things” in the first book of his epic poem, Paterson e whether that specific image is a red wheelbarrow, a brown sweater, or chilled plums in the icebox. Many of his poems, including The Dead Baby and On The Use Of Force, were inspired by experiences with patients, who prompted both his sympathy and his occasional irritation. In his autobiography, Williams claimed, “The poem springs from the halfspoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day. in that the secret lies.” Reports that Williams frequently wrote short poems on the back of prescription pads while sitting at the bedsides of laboring women are emblematic of the degree to which his clinical practice and writing life were intertwined. The last 15 years of Williams’ life were difficult physically e a heart attack in 1948, followed by a series of strokes, left him increasingly disabled e yet he continued to influence American literary movements throughout the 1950s,
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particularly the Beat Writers. Allan Ginsberg, the most well-known of the Beat poets, had grown up in Paterson, New Jersey, and corresponded extensively with Williams; Williams included a few of Ginsberg’s letters in Paterson, and wrote the introduction to Ginsberg’s Howl. In 1950, Williams won the first US National Book Award for Paterson. Accusations of Communist sympathies during the McCarthy Red Scare era took a toll on Williams, and he was hospitalized for depression in 1953. Despite a paralyzing stroke in 1955, he taught himself to write again, and published his final collection in 1962 e his 20th book of poetry e Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Critic Adam Kirsch summed up Williams’ life work: “Williams is the 20thcentury poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do.” In 1963, Williams died in Rutherford, the same town in which he was born. In 2012, Williams was honored philatelically by the United States (Scott 4656) as part of a series of stamps depicting 20th century poets.
April 2014;89(4):e35-e36
n
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.04.035 www.mayoclinicproceedings.org
Physician-Poet William Carlos Williamse“No Ideas But In Things” David P. Steensma, MD; Marc A. Shampo, PhD; and Robert A. Kyle, MD
M
ost physician-writers have either been unsuccessful practitioners (eg, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, Anton Chekhov) or have given up clinical work as soon as they achieved a modicum of literary success. William Carlos Williams managed to weave medical practice and writing into a seamless whole for decades, although this was often difficult e especially during the Second World War, when he was in his 60s and many younger physicians had been called away for military service. Biographer Linda WagnerMartin wrote that Williams “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician,” yet he famously delivered more than 2,000 babies, made innumerable house calls to the working-class triple-decker “Bayonne boxes” of Northern New Jersey, and served for 17 years as Chief Pediatrician for the Passaic General Hospital (now St. Mary’s Hospital) in Passaic, New Jersey. Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. His middle name, “Carlos,” reflects the Puerto Rican origin of his mother; his father was English and grew up in the West Indies before moving to New Jersey. After attending schools in Rutherford, Geneva, and Paris, Williams graduated from Horace Mann (High) School in New York City in 1902, and, after taking a special examination, was admitted at age 19 to the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school without formal undergraduate work. At Penn, Williams met poet Ezra Pound, who greatly influenced his later work, as well as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), a Bryn Mawr student whose father was a professor of astronomy (and who was briefly engaged to the much-older Pound, despite Williams’ affections for her). Pound promoted a Modernist aesthetic, fostered the career of young artists including Williams and H.D., and was the leading proponent of the Imagist movement in poetry, which stressed precise, clear, and spare economical language at the expense of meter, rhyme, and formal structure.
Williams’ medical career was spent as a general practitioner with a focus on pediatrics and neonatology. His first internship was at the French Hospital in Manhattan, where the work was grueling; his second, a pediatrics internship at the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital between 1908 and 1909, came to an abrupt end when he refused hospital administrators’ request to sign hospital bills without providing services. He then went to Europe and studied for a year in Leipzig, visiting Pound in London and touring the European continent before returning home to set up a practice in his hometown of Rutherford. Williams married Florence “Flossie” Herman in 1912 (after Flossie’s older sister had refused a marriage proposal), with whom he had two sons. Williams’ first book, Poems, was published in 1909 and sold just four copies, but, encouraged by Pound and by an internal drive e “I think all writing is a disease; you can’t stop it” e he continued to write. “My first poem was a bolt from the blue . it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. it filled me with soul satisfying joy.” His second book, The Tempest, was promoted by Pound and was much more successful than Poems; this work resulted in wider recognition of Williams’ talents and introductions to many New York-based artists. In contrast to the highly erudite and formal style of his Modernist contemporary, T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land was published in 1922 (much to Williams’ chagrin, as he felt Eliot’s work was not only a setback for Modernism, but also overshadowed his own efforts), Williams always wrote in ordinary language. “The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic”, summed up his philosophy. He claimed, “I don’t speak English, but the American idiom. I don’t know how to write anything else, and I refuse to learn.” Marianne Moore, who shared Williams’ dislike of esoteric literary allusions in writing and the constraints
Mayo Clin Proc. n April 2014;89(4):e35-e36 n http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.04.035 www.mayoclinicproceedings.org n ª 2014 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research
From Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (D.P.S.), and Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN (M.A.S., R.A.K.).
e35
MAYO CLINIC PROCEEDINGS
of traditional poetic forms, described Williams’ poetic language as, “plain American which cats and dogs can read.” Vivid imagery characterizes Williams’ best poems e he coined the phrase, “no ideas but in things” in the first book of his epic poem, Paterson e whether that specific image is a red wheelbarrow, a brown sweater, or chilled plums in the icebox. Many of his poems, including The Dead Baby and On The Use Of Force, were inspired by experiences with patients, who prompted both his sympathy and his occasional irritation. In his autobiography, Williams claimed, “The poem springs from the halfspoken words of such patients as the physician sees from day to day. in that the secret lies.” Reports that Williams frequently wrote short poems on the back of prescription pads while sitting at the bedsides of laboring women are emblematic of the degree to which his clinical practice and writing life were intertwined. The last 15 years of Williams’ life were difficult physically e a heart attack in 1948, followed by a series of strokes, left him increasingly disabled e yet he continued to influence American literary movements throughout the 1950s,
e36
Mayo Clin Proc.
n
particularly the Beat Writers. Allan Ginsberg, the most well-known of the Beat poets, had grown up in Paterson, New Jersey, and corresponded extensively with Williams; Williams included a few of Ginsberg’s letters in Paterson, and wrote the introduction to Ginsberg’s Howl. In 1950, Williams won the first US National Book Award for Paterson. Accusations of Communist sympathies during the McCarthy Red Scare era took a toll on Williams, and he was hospitalized for depression in 1953. Despite a paralyzing stroke in 1955, he taught himself to write again, and published his final collection in 1962 e his 20th book of poetry e Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Critic Adam Kirsch summed up Williams’ life work: “Williams is the 20thcentury poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do.” In 1963, Williams died in Rutherford, the same town in which he was born. In 2012, Williams was honored philatelically by the United States (Scott 4656) as part of a series of stamps depicting 20th century poets.
April 2014;89(4):e35-e36
n
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2013.04.035 www.mayoclinicproceedings.org