William Carlos Williams and the Subject of Aging

Abstract

This essay examines how Williams’s approach to the subject of aging in his poetry developed over time, from an early and inchoate desire for deeper knowledge of life to a complex celebration of aging as an integral part of the life process. It argues that Williams’s treatment of aging subjects (whether identified with the lyric speaker of a poem or a person characterized in a poem) is distinct from that of other major poets, encouraging the reader’s empathetic engagement while also pointing up the aging subject’s resistance to care. The essay concludes that Williams’s distinctive view of death, represented in a poem such as “The Descent,” is one of relinquishment rather than resistance.