Al Que Quiere!

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. During his long lifetime, he excelled both as a poet and a physician. His most anthologized poem The Red Wheelbarrow is considered an example of the Imagist movement’s style and principles. However, Williams, like his associate Ezra Pound, had long ago rejected the imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. He is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America’s cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. In May 1963 he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures From Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His major works are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Paterson (1963) and Imaginations (1970).