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

by Leibowitz, Herbert

• ISBN13: 9780374113292
• ISBN10: 0374113297
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-08
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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 freshand singularly Americanpoetic, 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 artistsincluding Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Wallace Stevens, and Allen Ginsbergbut 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.

Author Biography

Herbert Leibowitz has been the editor of the literary magazine Parnassus since he helped found it in 1973. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

“Mr. Leibowitz has written an acutely detailed, searching, and indeed discovering biography of an operose human being, the beloved New Jersey doctor and poet (and novelist and patriot-critic and autobiographer) William Carlos Williams, whose ever-provisional, always exploratory, and often experimental art was invariably committed to the illusive presentment of simplicity, familiarity, and even normality. Unlike any other studies of this figure, Leibowitz’s study of the good doctor Williams leaves us in no doubt of his troubled and troubling character. ‘Something Urgent I Have to Say to You’ is the first effectively intimate life-and-works study of a still uncertainly placed modern figure to offer a quandary, not a condolence call, a judgment that is neither a reassur­ance nor a bum’s rush. Patiently yet sportively, Herbert Leibowitz enables us to make the first grown-up reading of a man who has hitherto been offered as an adolescent hero or a childish hooligan. A valuable achievement!” —Richard Howard

“Besides being a famously exacting editor, Herbert Leibowitz is a writer of exceptional gifts—elegant prose, critical sensitivity, keen empathy, and narrative grace. In the protean career of William Carlos Williams, he has found his ideal subject. His search­ing account of Williams’s life and personality, as seen through the prism of his work, makes for irresistible reading.” —Morris Dickstein, author of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression

“In ‘Something Urgent I Have to Say to You’ Williams—inarguably a twentieth-century American master—is lovingly (but not uncritically) assessed in a twenty-first-century masterpiece of literary biography and analysis. With a fan’s enthusiasm and a scholar’s rigor, Herbert Leibowitz has given us a bountiful, beautiful project-of-a-lifetime book, the capacious embrace of which is made all the more amazing and all the more enduring by its author’s own sentence-by-sentence demonstration of verbal solidity wedded to verbal felicity.” —Albert Goldbarth