About a Little Girl

In the news today is the discovery of an unpublished poem by William Carlos Williams. Williams hung out with some pretty big names in literary history- Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, even James Joyce. But before you get the idea he was one of those expatriate writers scribbling away at cafés, the real story behind William Carlos Williams is that he was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from England and Puerto Rico. He spent some of his med school years in Europe, but did his internship in New York City. He settled down with a wife and medical practice in New Jersey.

William Carlos Williams is associated with a truckload of isms: liberalism, socialism, imagism, American Modernism, Dadaism- he even mentored poets of the Beat Generation, and influenced and wrote the introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Howl (see my post on Howl). But putting all those isms aside, what I love about William Carlos Williams are poems like those found in Pictures from Brueghel, which are so far removed from politics and isms, and are such lovely, intimate epiphanies about the pleasure and pain of being alive.

"About a Little Girl," the poem which has just been discovered, is one such intimate poem. Williams wrote the poem for the daughter of family friends- the eleven-year-old girl had been diagnosed with leukemia. As a physician, Williams reviewed the little girl's medical tests, and believed she would die. According to the article I read, "The poem contrasts a happy, outgoing "angel" of a child with the death he [Williams] believed would overtake her."

Happily Dr. Williams was wrong, and the child lived to be a 92-year-old grandmother. One of her grandsons became a professor of English and, realizing what a treasure his family had been keeping as a personal keepsake since 1921, decided to to donate the poem today to Southeast Missouri State University.