Reviews: Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams

SOMETHING URGENT I HAVE TO SAY TO YOU : THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011 HB, 494 pp, £23.99 William Carlos Williams, along with TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, was one of the great modernist poets of the century which America claimed for itself with the construction of the Panama Canal exactly a hundred years ago. Unlike the other three, as his latest biographer Herbert Leibowitz remarks, Williams was the only one who, although he had no party allegiance, stayed left-liberal in his opinions. At a time when the strength of the dollar made it easy for US writers to expatriate themselves, Williams spent nearly all his life in the town in which he was born in 1883 — Rutherford, New Jersey — in earshot of the ‘infinite variety’ of US voices that he wanted to bring into poetry. This he did, by trial and error, devising a punchy, humane, casual-sounding diction that went on to become influential, peopling his poems with the demotic of ‘ nurses and prostitutes, policemen and religious fanatics, farmers and fish peddlers, drunkards … blues singers and barbers ’. He broke down the poetic line, abandoning the rhythms of the ear for the cubist lines of the eye. ‘ No ideas but in things ’ he wrote; and it became a kind of mantra. It was a plea for candour after the vague abstractions of the previous century: the …