Poet, artist, and practicing physician of Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams wrote poetry that was experimental in form, ranging from imagism to objectivism, with great originality of idiom and human vitality. Credited with changing and directing American poetry toward a new metric and language, he also wrote a large number of short stories and novels. Paterson (1946--58), about the New Jersey city of that name, was his epic and places him with Ezra Pound of the Cantos as one of the great shapers of the long poem in this century. National recognition did not come early, but eventually Williams received many honors, including a vice-presidency of the National Institute of Arts… and Letters (1952); the Bollingen Prize (1953); the $5,000 fellowship of the Academy of American Poets; the Loines Award for poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1948); and the Brandeis Award (1957). Book II of Paterson received the first National Book Award for poetry in 1949. Williams was named consultant in poetry in English to the Library of Congress for 1952--53. Williams's continuously inventive style anchored not only objectivism, the school to which he most properly belongs, but also a long line of subsequent poets as various as Robert Lowell, Frank O'Hara, and Allen Ginsberg. With Stevens, he forms one of the most important sources of a specifically American tradition of modernism. In addition to his earlier honors, Williams received two important awards posthumously, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1963) and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1963).
Arthur Walton Litz, Jr. was born on October 31, 1929. He was an American literary historian and critic who served as professor of English Literature at Princeton University from 1956 to 1993. He is the author or editor of over twenty collections of literary criticism. Litz graduated from Princeton University in 1951 and received his Ph.D. from Oxford University while studying on a Rhodes Scholarship at Merton College in 1951-54. He became the Holmes Professor of English Literature at Princeton in 1956. He was named to the Eastman Visiting Professorship at Balliol College, Oxford in 1989. Bread Loaf professor from the early 1970s through the early 1990s and a literary historian and critic… who served as professor of English literature at Princeton University from 1956 to 1993, Arthur Litz, Jr. died on June 4, 2014, at University Medical Center of Princeton in New Jersey.