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American Literature / Unit 14   AML 1327 short lesson, about 20 seconds

William Carlos Williams: The Doctor Poet

Captions available

The idea

Williams practised medicine in Rutherford, New Jersey, for forty years and wrote between patients. He argued against Eliot's learned, European difficulty and for a poetry made from American speech and local material, which put him at the centre of the argument about what modernism should be.

In practice

A country doctor, writing between patients.

Where people slip

He treated The Waste Land as a disaster for poetry.

Your place on the trail

Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.

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