William Carlos Williams worked hard throughout his career to reach his goal of perfecting his own simple and modern style of poetry, along with the help of some friends. William lived in the era of modernism and was considered to be an imagist poet. Williams strived to write poetry that focused on modern people and everyday situations in the simplest of words. But how did the events and people in his lifetime influence the way Williams wrote poetry? William Carlos Williams poetry was heavily influenced by the modernist era, poet, Ezra Pound, Imagism, and his many European travels. As a poet, novelist, and physician, born in Rutherford New Jersey, William Carlos Williams developed an understandable and meaningful style of poetry. He first went to school in Geneva, Switzerland, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received his Medical Degree in 1906. He continued to study pediatrics when he returned to Rutherford in 1910. He focused on his medical career for 40 years …show more content…
He lived in the Modernist Era which started in the late 19th Century and continued up until the early 20th Century. Modernism focused on modern life, everyday concepts, and situations easy to understand. Modernism was also a combination of ideas like futuristic and nihilistic. Modernists expressed the idea of modernism through poetry, writing, and music. In modernist poetry, free verse was used by poets. Free verse is a literary device that is used to express free thought. Free verse commonly does not include regular meter or a particular rhyme scheme although it could (Notaro, Anna.). A feature of modernism is imagism which was a precursor to modernism. A smaller literary movement below modernism was Imagism which happened in the same era (Materer, Timothy.). The Modernist Era shaped the way William Carlos Williams wrote