Per Hugh Fox, Williams saw "the real [original emphasis] function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder.

"[8] While he wrote in English, "the poet's first language" was Spanish and his "consciousness and social orientation" were shaped by Caribbean customs; his life influenced "to a very important degree by a plural cultural foundation.

[7] Williams received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897 when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris.

[12] Shortly afterward, his second book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound, whom he had met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations.

[7] In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (including H.D., Pound and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his more experimental books Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

[16] Williams had an affair with the Baroness, and published three poems in Contact, describing the forty-year-old as "an old lady" with "broken teeth [and] syphilis".

[17] In 1923, Williams published Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, which contained the classics "By the road to the contagious hospital", "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie".

Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.

Titled The First President, it was focused on George Washington and his influence on the history of the United States of America and was intended to "galvanize us into a realization of what we are today.

"[20] —Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light!

He also examined the role of the poet in American society and famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and repeated again and again in Paterson).

"[26] A contemporary, Harriet Monroe, stated "to assert his freedoms he must play the devil, showing himself rioting in purple and turquoise pools of excess.

However, Williams, like his peer and friend Ezra Pound, had rejected the Imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923.

Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of United States cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture.

[30] Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.

Stylistically, Williams also worked with variations on a line-break pattern that he labeled "triadic-line poetry" in which he broke a long line into three free-verse segments.

[34] A painting by him now hangs in Yale University's Beinecke Library[35] and as late as 1962 he was still remembering in an interview that "I'd like to have been a painter, and it would have given me at least as great a satisfaction as being a poet.

"[37] Founded by the poet Alfred Kreymborg and the artist Man Ray, they included Walter Conrad Arensberg, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Orrick Glenday Johns and Marcel Duchamp.

Although he championed the new way of seeing and representation pioneered by the European avant-garde, Williams and his artistic friends wished to get away from what they saw as a purely derivative style.

Of this late phase of his work it has been claimed that "Williams saw these artists solving, in their own ways, the same problems that concerned him,"[43] but his engagement with them was at a distance.

Williams retained legal counsel to refute the charges but was never allowed to respond to his critics and never received an apology from the Library of Congress.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the gold medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.