William Carlos Williams and Autobiography: The Woods of His Own Nature

By Ann W. Fisher-Wirth and Ann Fisher-Wirth

The artist is always and forever painting only one thing: a self portrait. Beginning with these words of Williams's, Fisher-Wirth considers a number of Williams's writings as autobiography. The relatively conventional Autobiography of William Carlos Williams presents his career in public terms and suppresses the knowledge of both sex and death. At the other extreme, the play A Dream of Love is an intensely personal confession. Apart from these works, William Carlos Williams and Autobiography concentrates on Williams's poems. The early unpublished "Philip and Oradie" sends a persecuted and alienated prince on a grandiose, doomed quest. Reacting against this mode, Williams wrote "The Wanderer" in which he is baptized in the "filthy Passaic river" and emerges as the poet we know, whose identity is found through surrendering to the "weeds, bearing seeds," the flotsam of experience. He goes on to create a new kind of autobiography, focused on concrete objects of perception and only indirectly on the self. Williams's development culminates in "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," the long, late love poem to his wife that unites public and private autobiographical desires and is his deepest and fullest autobiography.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271006536
• ISBN13: 9780271006536
• Release Date: October 1990
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"