William Carlos Williams Letters Given to Baker

A collection of personal letters from the late William Carlos Williams has been presented to Baker Library by David R. Wang '55, a faculty member at Geneseo State College of the State University of New York.

The letters, numbering about a dozen, were written during the years between 1957 and 1961, in the course of a collaboration between Dr. Williams and Mr. Wang on the translation of the work of a number of Chinese poets. The result of their work appeared in 1966 as The Cassia Tree, part of the anthology New Directions #19.

Presented to the Dartmouth Library last spring, the letters were put on exhibit during the summer. Mr. Wang has presented copies of the collection to the Yale University Library.

The correspondence occurred not long before the physician-poet's death in 1963, after he had already suffered three major strokes. The collection is augmented by further correspondence from Mrs. Williams.

Mr. Wang, class poet of 1955, subse- quently dedicated to Dr. Williams "The Grandfather Cycle," a family epic which appeared in the February 1966 issue of TheHuman Voice Quarterly.

Mr. Wang has received two master of arts degrees since graduating from Dartmouth, one in creative writing from San Francisco State College, the other in comparative literature from the University of Southern California. The subject of a doctoral dissertation for USC is Cathay Revisited: The ChineseTradition in Four American Poets.

A prolific poet, Mr. Wang has published his verse and translations in a number of literary journals and anthologies. He was born in Shanghai, the descendent of Wang Wei, an eighth-century T'ang dynasty poet, painter, and physician.