William Carlos Williams was an American poet and physician of Latin American descent closely associated with modernism and imagism. His Spring and All (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922). In his five-volume poem Paterson (1946–1958), he took Paterson, New Jersey as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'" Some of his best known poems, "This Is Just to Say" and "The Red Wheelbarrow", are reflections on the everyday. Other poems reflect the influence of the visual arts. He, in turn, influenced the visual arts; his poem "The Great Figure" inspired the painting I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold by Charles Demuth. Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962).
Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism has been termed "a succession of creative moments" rather than a continuous or sustained period of development. The French academic René Taupin remarked that "it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a small number of important principles".
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. An author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer.
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was heavily influenced by the Black Mountain poets and by the political context of the Vietnam War, which she explored in her poetry book The Freeing of the Dust. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
John Champlin Gardner Jr. was an American novelist, essayist, literary critic, and university professor. He is best known for his 1971 novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth from the monster's point of view.
Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."
John Frederick Nims was an American poet and academic.
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an ecphrastic poem by the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams that was written in response to Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, traditionally attributed to Pieter Bruegel. Williams first published the poem as part of a sequence in The Hudson Review in 1960, subsequently using the sequence as the basis for his final book, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, published in 1962.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi-American poet based in the United States.
The Desert Music and Other Poems was a 1954 Random House book collecting 1949-54 poems by the American modernist poet/writer William Carlos Williams. It is now collected, along with Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and Journey to Love (1955), in the New Directions paperback Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams: Collected Poems 1950-1962.
Journey to Love was a 1955 Random House book by the American modernist poet/writer William Carlos Williams. He dedicated it to his wife. All of the poems are in triadic stanza form, sometimes "with a short fourth line to fill out the measure."
The Blind Leading the Blind, Blind, or The Parable of the Blind is a painting by the Netherlandish Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, completed in 1568. Executed in distemper on linen canvas, it measures 86 cm × 154 cm. It depicts the Biblical parable of the blind leading the blind from Matthew 15:14, and is in the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy.
John Allman, also known as Jack Allman, is an American poet.
A Lume Spento is a 1908 poetry collection by Ezra Pound. Self-published in Venice, it was his first collection.
Thomas Canning was an American composer and music educator, serving as a professor of composition and music theory at the Eastman school and as composer-in-residence at West Virginia University. He also held appointments at Morningside College, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the Royal Conservatory of Music. In his composition work, he created music for specific occasions or ceremonies, focusing on hymns and choral works, and collaborated with poets Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams to create music in conjunction with their works. His best-known orchestral work, Fantasy on a Hymn by Justin Morgan (1944), was recorded by Leopold Stokowski and Howard Hanson.
The Wedge is a 1944 book of poems by American modernist writer and poet William Carlos Williams. He assembled this collection in response to requests from American servicemen during World War II for a pocket-sized collection of his work to take into deployment with them. Despite the poet's inquiries and the nature of the requests that prompted him to approach them, several publishers rejected The Wedge. Their grounds for doing so were a perceived lack of literary quality and wartime shortages. The book was eventually handset printed by Henry Duncan and Wightman Williams at Cummington Press and bound surreptitiously on the premises and at the expense of one of the publishers who had previously rejected it. The book is dedicated to poet Louis Zukofsky, who helped Williams revise and rearrange the poems for publication.
