William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was a doctor, a poet, an essayist, a novelist, and a playwright famous for his unique and succinct modernist poems. Williams studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he befriended Ezra Pound, whose imagist ideas greatly influenced Williams’s early work. Later in his writing career, Williams forged his own path, trying to create a uniquely American poetry that emphasized the importance of the everyday. His most influential collections include Spring and All (1923), The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and his six-book epic, Paterson (1963).

The Great Figure

William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Great Figure” was published in Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems in 1921.

Among the rain

and lights

I saw the figure 5

in gold

5

on a red

firetruck

moving

tense

unheeded

10

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city.

(1921)