BBC Radio 4

‘No ideas, but in things’: William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963) developed this maxim into a new poetry for America. At the centenary of the foundation of Imagism, Annie Freud investigates his mind and work. 

Williams was central to the Imagist movement that broke away from the formulaic verse of the Romantic tradition to master a language of "swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing".

Despite the admiration for his work today, he spent most of his life in anxious isolation, unrecognised as the revolutionary that he undoubtedly was. A doctor and life-long resident of Rutherford (New Jersey), he relied on his patients, the mixture of people around him, and his own imagination to create a new, distinctively American verse.