Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays of William Carlos Williams

by William Carlos Williams

For this volume, originally published in cloth in 1961, William Carlos Williams collected, and revised, four full-length plays and the libretto of an opera on George Washington. As might be expected of the man who did most in our time to create a new and truly "American" idiom for poetry, Dr. Williams' writing for the stage challenges producers and actors to extend the range of modern drama. Many Loves, which ran for nearly a year (1959) in repertory at New York's famous Living Theatre, explores four varieties of human attachment, while A Dream of Love, first produced in 1949, is a penetrating and poetic treatment of infidelity and marriage. Tituba's Children, written three years before Arthur Miller's Crucible, is a dramatic study of witch-hunting – the Salem trials of 1692 and McCarthyism in the 1950's. The First President was first published in 1936. It is preceded by a long introduction on the theory of opera, the role of music, and the problems of realizing a historic figure on the stage. The Cure (1960) reminds us that Dr. Williams was for forty-two years a practicing physician. Its theme, developed in a very unusual situation, is the relationship between nurse and patient.

Genres: Fiction, Plays

1 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1961

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.