The poet, doctor, and publisher William Carlos Williams lived one of the most interesting literary lives of the twentieth century. While studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Williams met Ezra Pound, a man who would become an important influence on Williams’s writing and introduce him to some of the most important literary figures of the late modernist period, such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Though initially an imagist poet like Pound, Williams broke with him and sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.
Herbert Leibowitz’s “Something Urgent I Have to Say to You” not only documents the exciting life of the man who rubbed shoulders with some of the twentieth century’s most important artists—including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsberg—but provides a new perspective on the poetry that inspired a whole new movement in American verse. It is both a long-overdue portrait of an important writer and his work and an entertaining examination of the twentieth-century avant-garde art scene.
