William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams was born the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry, and he grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey. He was a medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. With Ezra Pound and H.D., Williams was a leading poet of the Imagist movement and often wrote of American subjects and themes. Though his career was initially overshadowed by other poets, he became an inspiration to the Beat generation in the 1950s and 60s.  He was known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than 40 years serving the citizens of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest.  Source

The Fool’s Song

I tried to put a bird in a cage.

                O fool that I am!

      For the bird was Truth.

Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put

                 Truth in a cage!

 

And when I had the bird in the cage,

                 O fool that I am!

      Why, it broke my pretty cage.

Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put

                  Truth in a cage!

 

And when the bird was flown from the cage,

                  O fool that I am!

        Why, I had nor bird nor cage.

Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put

                   Truth in a cage!

             Heigh-ho! Truth in a cage.

Published:

1913

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Imagism

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2023

2025

Themes:

Agency

Nature

Literary Devices:

Extended Metaphor

a metaphor that extends through several lines or even an entire poem

Imperative

an instruction or a command

Irony

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times