Letter from William Carlos Williams to Charlotte Kohler, July 30, 1960

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 For VQR’s Fall 1960 issue, William Carlos Williams contributed the poem “To the Ghost of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.” A hugely influential and prolific poet of the twentieth century, Williams published more than twenty poetry collections, including Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New Directions, 1962), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In this poem, he celebrates and reimagines the life and labor of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, an author known for her deeply intimate works that consider the relationships between people, their larger community, and the quiet natural beauty of rural settings. Williams writes of the important work undertaken by Rawlings, the life she managed to capture while exposing herself to humanity in its extremes, and acknowledges the toll work of that nature can take on an author. 

His desire to honor Rawlings extended beyond the poem itself: In a 1960 letter to VQR Editor Charlotte Kohler, Williams explains that he chose the magazine as the place for this poem “as the chief representative of a region Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings served in her literary life…” and that he thinks “she’d be pleased to have been so remembered.”