During his lifetime, however, Williams was “lil Bill” to his bigger, more successful friend Ezra Pound, who laughed at his insistence on staying in Rutherford. The son of immigrants who never naturalised, Williams's dedication to America did not flag, though it was a country that often disappointed him. Peopling his poems with “nurses and prostitutes, policemen and religious fanatics, farmers and fish peddlers, drunkards…blues singers and barbers”, Williams wanted to pin down the whole messy country with his short, punchy lines of poetry. Sometimes he succeeded, as when he describes the euphoric crowds at a baseball game, or when he catches a glimpse of “A big young bareheaded woman/in an apron” on the pavement, bending down to remove a nail from her shoe. With the eyes of a doctor, he recorded the quotidian and the overlooked. He coined the maxim “no ideas but in things”. To his critics, the saying exposed him as an anti-intellectual, or as a poet who could only create “American speech barking at song.”

然而究其一生，在比威廉姆斯年长、事业更成功的朋友艾泽拉·庞德（译者注：英美现代派诗歌奠基人之一）看来，威廉姆斯永远都只是“小比尔”。庞德嘲笑他留在卢瑟福镇的执着。作为从未加入美国国籍的移民者之子，威廉姆斯对美国的衷心从未减退，尽管这个国家一再地令他失望。充斥在他的诗歌间的是“护士和妓女，警察和宗教狂热分子，农夫和鱼贩，醉鬼…布鲁斯歌手和理发师”，威廉姆斯意图用他简短有力的诗句来描绘整个国家的世间百态。有时他成功了，比如他描写棒球比赛上的欢快人群，或者当他瞥见“一位硕大的年轻女子不戴帽子/穿着围裙”，在人行道上俯身擦去她鞋子上的一片指甲。他以医生的视角记录那些平凡的事和被忽视的人。他首创了“文中无意，寓境于物”的格言。对威廉姆斯的批评家来说，这个说法暴露了他不是一位智者，或者说，他只不过是一位开创了“美语吠叫诗歌”的诗人。