William Carlos Williams

passport photo, 1921
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/fd/William_Carlos_Williams_passport_photograph_1921.jpg
(source: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University)

He is the master of succinctness and subtle interactivity, this defines him perfectly. It's a comment I found in a blogpost dedicated to the most famous poem of William Carlos Williams. I will speak some other time about this most famous poem (as I will speak about that blog, authored by Roger Ebert).

Allen Ginsberg claimed that William Carlos Williams essentially freed his poetic voice. Williams was perhaps the main mentor of the great generation of the fifties: the Beat Generation, the San Fransisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain Poets, the NY School, and beyond. I had the privilege to meet some of today's NY writers, a Steve Dalachinsky, an Eve Packer, and, above all, the person whom I love beyond all our quarrels, my sister Jill Rapaport. All of them, directly or indirectly, found the courage to free their poetic voices in the literature of William Carlos Williams.

• The Way a Haiku Began In a Parisian Bookstore (The Red Wheelbarrow) (1923)
• This Is Just To Say (1934)

(A Life in Books)