"Something Urgent I Have to Say to You"
The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era-Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others-Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking to invent an entirely fresh and singularly American poetic, whose subject matter derived from the everyday lives of the citizens and poor immigrant communities of northern New Jersey. His poems mirrored both the conflicts of his own life and the convulsions that afflicted American society-two world wars, a rampaging flu pan-demic, and the Great Depression.
Leibowitz's biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative. "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" is both a long-overdue assessment of a major American writer and an entertaining examination of the twentieth-century avant-garde art and poetry scene, with its memorable cast of eccentric pioneers, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
William Carlos Williams was an uneven figure: controversial as a modernist seeking a plainer American idiom; a trusted physician to untold women of Rutherford, N.J., yet a flagrant philanderer who somehow remained married for 50 years; an artist belonging to no school, imagist or otherwise, who is regarded, in the words of one poet, as "a dumb ox." He was one of the few modernist champions of liberal ideals. This is likewise an uneven biography. Leibowitz supplements Paul Mariani's towering work of 30 years ago, but he does not supersede it. His title is taken from one of Williams's greatest poems, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," and indicates how the author of Kora in Hell, In the American Grain, and other masterpieces of disheveled elegance sought to confess and justify his actual and imaginative lives to his wife, Floss, as well as to all readers. Leibowitz is no apologist, but he does cut Williams considerable slack, and the book circles round Williams's life by seeking it through liberal quotes from his work. With decidedly mixed success, the book is an uneasy attempt at mingling psychobiography with literary criticism. Photos.