William Carlos Williams in the context of "Robert Lowell"

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a painting in oil on canvas measuring 73.5 by 112 centimetres (28.9 in × 44.1 in) now in the Oldmasters Museum (part of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium) in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. However, following technical examinations in 1996 of the painting hanging in the Brussels museum, that attribution is regarded as very doubtful, and the painting, perhaps painted in the 1560s, is now usually seen as a good early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel's lost original, perhaps from about 1558. According to the museum: "It is doubtful the execution is by Bruegel the Elder, but the composition can be said with certainty to be his", although recent technical research has re-opened the question.

The painting is Bruegel's only subject taken from classical mythology, and is largely derived from Ovid. It is described in W. H. Auden's famous poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", then the name of the museum in Brussels which holds the painting, and became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, as well as "Lines on Bruegel's 'Icarus'" by Michael Hamburger.

Nancy Clara Cunard (10 March 1896 – 17 March 1965) was a British writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian diplomat, orator, and statesman V. K. Krishna Menon.

In later years she suffered from mental illness, and her physical health deteriorated. When she died in the Hôpital Cochin, Paris, she weighed only 26 kilograms (57 pounds; 4 stone 1 pound).

Mina Loy (born Mina Gertrude Löwy; 27 December 1882 – 25 September 1966) was a British-born artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others.

The "Great American Novel" (sometimes abbreviated as GAN) is the term for a canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay and later shortened to GAN. De Forest noted that the Great American Novel had most likely not been written yet.

Practically, the term refers to a small number of books that have historically been the nexus of discussion, including Moby-Dick (1851), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), The Great Gatsby (1925), and several others. Exactly what novel or novels warrant the title is without consensus and an assortment have been contended as the idea has evolved and continued into the modern age, with fluctuations in popular and critical regard. William Carlos Williams, Clyde Brion Davis and Philip Roth have all written novels about the Great American Novel—titled as such—with Roth's in the 1970s, a time of great interest in the concept.

Spring and All is a volume of poems by William Carlos Williams, first published in 1923 by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co.

Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."

While Williams might or might not have said so himself, commentators such as Christoper Beach and Margaret Lloyd have called Paterson his response to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Pound's Cantos. The long gestation time of Paterson before its first book was published was due in large part to Williams's honing of prosody outside of conventional meter and his development of an overall structure that would stand on a par with Eliot and Pound yet remain endemically American, free from past influences and older forms.

"This Is Just to Say" (1934) is an imagist poem by William Carlos Williams. The three-versed, 28-word poem is an apology about eating the reader's plums. The poem was written as if it were a note left on a kitchen table. It has been widely pastiched.

"The Red Wheelbarrow" is a poem by American modernist poet William Carlos Williams. Originally published without a title, it was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection which incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose. Only 16 words long, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is one of Williams' most frequently anthologized poems, and a prime example of early twentieth-century Imagism.