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Scoop.it!
If you look at the lingua franca of American poetry today—a colloquial free verse focused on visual description and meaningful anecdote—it seems clear that William Carlos Williams is the twentieth-century poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do. Why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?
bobbygw's insight:
The essayist is Adam Kirsch, a poet and critic. His most recent book is The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century. (June 2017)
Briefly about William Carlos Williams, from the PoetryFoundation.org: has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness." 
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