William Carlos Williams Reviews His Life

More poets should write their autobiographies if the one William Carlos Williams published is a fair sample. Poets tend to have greater powers of insight and of putting themselves across In language than the next man, and in autobiography this matters. So often an autobiography is a tedious catalogue of data about mother and father, their mother and father, the furniture in the old home, the trouble with pimples in adolescence and algebra in high school. Later the routine switches to particulars about women the author has slept with.

All this Williams zealously eschews. He announces he will do so in the foreword to his book: "Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most had better not be told; it would interest no one . . ."

What emerges are the somewhat disorganized yet coherent recollections of a man who feels that, "As a writer, I have been a physician, and as a physician a writer." To a reader as innocent as I am of substantial knowledge of American poetry, Williams' remembrance of his early years has more appeal. It contains random remarks of his early home, school, early friends, his college days and some of the friends he made there such as Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore, his travels in Europe and then some more about his literary friends.

How engagingly he writes! He has the poet's knack for composing a word picture that is sharp yet has the distracting detail cropped away. He has the modern poet's virtue of fashioning simple sentences with simple words. For instance he says of his first book. "The poems were bad Keats, nothing else--oh well, bad Whitman too. But I sure loved them. Where does a young man get the courage for such abortions? I can tell you my need must have been great. There is not one thing of the slightest value in the whole thin booklet--except the intent."

In the latter half of the book. Williams occasionally discusses modern poetry on a plane too advanced for the shoddily prepped reader. But this is only occasional. Most of the book is well within any literati's grasp. In fact by the time the 349th page is finished, the Autobiography of William Carlos Williams constitutes a useful and very easy to digest primer in one school of modern American literature.