St. Francis in William Carlos Williams

This article shows how, throughout his life, and especially during his last years, William Carlos Williams had a special admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, who, in addition to being an original poet working in a new language, loved and respected nature and was a model of generosity and forgiveness. The article examines Williams’s approach to religion and traces the development of his notion of the imagination, in particular in relation to ideas concerning the super-natural.