LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS

LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was born on September 17,1883 , in Rutherford, New jersey. His father had emigrated from Birmingham, England and his mother (whose mother Basque and whose father was of Dutch-Jewish descent) from Puerto Rico. Williams attended schools in Rutherford until 1897,when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycee Condorcet in Paris. Oh his return he attended the Horace Mann High school in  new York city. After having passed a special examination, he was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the university of Pennsylvania. There he met two poets. Hilda Doolittle and Ezra pound. The latter friendship had a permanent effect; Williams said he could divide his life into Before pound and After Pound.

Williams did his internship in New York from 1926 to 1909, writing verse in between patients. He published a first book, poem, in 1909. Then he went to Leipzig in 1909 to study pediatrics , and after that returned to Rutherford to practice medicine there for the rest of his life.in 1912 he married Florence Herman (or “ Flossie”) . In 1913 pound secured a London publisher for Williams’ second book , the Tempers . But his first distinctly original book was Al Que Quiere ! (To Him who wants It ! ) , published in Boston in 1917. In the following years he wrote not Only poem but short stories , novels , essays , and an autobiography. In 1946 he began the fulfillment of a long-standing plant, to write an epic poem, with the publication of Paterson, book I . The three following book appeared in 1948, 1949, and 1951; in 1952 he suffered a crippling stroke, which forced him to give up his medical practice and drastically limited his ability to write . Nonetheless he continued to so so , producing an unanticipated fifth book of Paterson in 1958 as well as shorter poems. He died in Rutherford in march 4, 1963 . Two months latter his last book of lyrics won the Pulitzer prize for poetry.