William Carlos Williams wrote poetry during one of the most radical periods of continual social, aesthetic, and political upheaval in the past several centuries of Western history. Williams published his first book in 1909 and his last in 1962, during which time he lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression. All this to say, the literary world under which Williams was brought up and the one he helped to shape went through a series of radical breaks, the shape of which inform good interpretations of Williams’s work.

Before Williams met Ezra Pound as a fellow student in university, his poetic figure par excellence was the Romantic writer John Keats. Following Keats, Williams strove to write precise and formal poems, emphasizing both beauty and classical closed-form craftsmanship. After meeting Pound and joining the newly formed Imagist poets, Williams shifted his poetics to seek a new kind of art: one which shed the old rigid formal constraints to instead emphasize living, breathing imagery. Unlike his previous ornate Keatsian aspirations, Williams’s work now dedicated itself to direct speech, pared-down prosody, and the creation of fresh and vividly sensuous images.

Much of Williams’s Imagist aspirations are readily apparent in “To Wake an Old Lady.