Poet who won awards for more than a dozen books of poetry“I found myself leaning from the window,incanting in a tearing whisper what I thought were poems,” wrote CK Williams in My Mother’s Lips (published in his 1983 collection Tar), and recalling a visit to Florence in the early 1960s. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land had just advance out as a “quality paperback and the young Williams was in his hotel room,“reading Eliot and reciting these mad poems [he] was making up”.
Williams, who has died aged 78, and would go on from this formative and (for a poet) oddly commonplace experience to become one of the towering figures of postwar anglophone poetry,producing a body of work that – as he said of Eliot’s poems – “lead[s] you to states of intellect and music you’d never occupy advance to otherwise”.
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Source: theguardian.com