William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He lived there most of his life, practising medicine as a paediatrician. While studying at the Pennsylvania Medical School he became a friend of Ezra Pound and H. Doolittle, and was deeply influenced by Imagism. The limitations of Imagism, however, soon led him to launch his own campaign to 'create somehow by intense, individual effort, a new - and American - poetic language.'
