William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has always been known as an experimenter, an innovator, a revolutionary figure in American poetry. Yet in comparison to artists of his own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Williams lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, he relied on his patients, the America around him, and his own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse. Often domestic in focus and "remarkable for its empathy, sympathy, its muscular and emotional identification with its subjects," Williams's poetry is also characteristically honest: "There is no optimistic blindness in Williams," wrote Randall Jarrell, "though there is a fresh gaiety, a stubborn or invincible joyousness."

Born the first of two sons of an English father and a Puerto Rican mother of French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry, Williams grew up in Rutherford, where his family provided him with a fertile background in art and literature. His father's mother, coincidentally named Emily Dickinson, was a lover of theatre, and his own mother painted. Williams's father introduced his favorite author, Shakespeare, to his sons and read Dante and the Bible to them as well; but Williams had other interests in study. His enthusiastic pursuit of math and science at New York City's Horace Mann High School "showed how little writing entered into any of my calculations." Later in high school, though, Williams took an interest in languages and felt for the first time the excitement of great books. He recalled his first poem, also written during that time, giving him a feeling of joy.

Aside from an emerging writing consciousness, Williams's early life was "sweet and sour," reported Reed Whittemore; Williams himself wrote that "terror dominated my youth, not fear." Part of this terror, speculated James Breslin, came "from the rigid idealism and moral perfectionism his parents tried to instill in him." Williams's letters written while a student at the University of Pennsylvania to his mother exemplify some of the expectations he carried: "I never did and never will do a premeditated bad deed in my life," he wrote in 1904. "Also... I have never had and never will have anything but the purest and highest and best thoughts about you and papa." It was largely parental influence that sent him directly from high school to Pennsylvania in the first place—to study medicine. But as Breslin noted, Williams used his college experiences as a means to creativity, instead of, as his parents might have wished, as a means to success.

The conflict Williams felt between his parents' hopes for their son's success in medicine and his own less conventional impulses is mirrored in his poetic heroes of the time—John Keats and Walt Whitman. Keats's traditionally rhymed and metered verse impressed the young poet tremendously. "Keats was my God," Williams later revealed; and his first major poetic work was a model of Keats's "Endymion." In contrast, Whitman's free verse offered "an impulse toward freedom and release of the self," said Donald Barlow Stauffer. Williams explained how he came to associate Whitman with this impulse toward freedom when he said, "I reserved my 'Whitmanesque' thoughts, a sort of purgation and confessional, to clear my head and heart from turgid obsessions." Yet, by his first year at Pennsylvania Williams had found a considerably more vivid mentor than Whitman in a friend, Ezra Pound.

Williams's friendship with Pound marked a watershed in the young poet's life: he later insisted, "before meeting Pound is like B.C. and A.D." "Under Pound's influence and other stimuli," reported John Malcolm Brinnin, "Williams was soon ready to close the door on the 'studied elegance of Keats on one hand and the raw vigor of Whitman on the other.'" Aside from the poetic influences, Pound introduced Williams to a group of friends, including poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and painter Charles Demuth, "who shared the kinds of feelings that in Rutherford had made him frightened and isolated," Breslin declared. H.D., for example, with her arty dress and her peculiarities—sometimes she'd splash ink onto her clothes "to give her a feeling of freedom and indifference towards the mere means of writing"—fascinated Williams with a "provocative indifference to rule and order which I liked."

In a similar way, it was a reaction against the rigid and ordered poetry of the time that led Williams to join Pound, H.D., and others as the core of what became known as the Imagist movement. While correlative revolutionary movements had begun in painting (Cezanne), music (Stravinsky), and fiction (Stein), poetry was still bogged down by "the inversions and redundancies imposed by the effort 'to fill out a standard form,'" explained David Perkins. The Imagists broke from this formulaic poetry by stressing a verse of "swift, uncluttered, functional phrasing." Williams's first book, Poems (1909), a "conventional" work, "correct in sentiment and diction," preceded the Imagist influence. But in The Tempers (1913), as Bernard Duffey realized, Williams's "style was directed by an Imagist feeling, though it still depended on romantic and poeticized allusiveness." And while Pound drifted towards increased allusiveness in his work, Williams stuck with Pound's tenet to "make it new." By 1917 and the publication of his third book, Al Que Quiere!, "Williams began to apply the Imagist principle of 'direct treatment of the thing' fairly rigorously," declared James Guimond. Also at this time, as Perkins demonstrated, Williams was "beginning to stress that poetry must find its 'primary impetus'... in 'local conditions.'" "I was determined to use the material I knew," Williams later reflected; and as a doctor, Williams knew intimately the people of Rutherford.

Beginning with his internship in the decrepit "Hell's Kitchen" area of New York City and throughout his forty years of private practice in Rutherford, Williams heard the "inarticulate poems" of his patients. As a doctor, his "medical badge," as he called it, permitted him "to follow the poor defeated body into those gulfs and grottos..., to be present at deaths and births, at the tormented battles between daughter and diabolic mother." From these moments, poetry developed: "it has fluttered before me for a moment, a phrase which I quickly write down on anything at hand, any piece of paper I can grab." Some of his poems were born on prescription blanks, others typed in a few spare minutes between patient visits. Williams's work, however, did more than fuel his poetry: it allowed him "to write what he chose, free from any kind of financial or political pressure. From the beginning," disclosed Linda Wagner, "he understood the tradeoffs: he would have less time to write; he would need more physical stamina than people with only one occupation.... [He] was willing to live the kind of rushed existence that would be necessary, crowding two full lifetimes into one,... learning from the first and then understanding through the second." There is little doubt that he succeeded in both: Richard Ellman and Robert O'Clair called him "the most important literary doctor since Chekov."

Williams's deep sense of humanity pervaded both his work in medicine and his writings. "He loved being a doctor, making house calls, and talking to people," his wife, Flossie, fondly recollected. Perhaps a less subjective appraisal came from Webster Schott, who defined Williams as "an immensely complicated man: energetic, compassionate, socially conscious, depressive, urbane, provincial, tough, fastidious, capricious, independent, dedicated, completely responsive.... He was the complete human being, and all of the qualities of his personality were fused in his writings." And, as Randall Jarrell pointed out, it is precisely in his written work where Williams demonstrates that "he feels, not just says, that the differences between men are less important than their similarities—that he and you and I, together, are the Little Men."

Corresponding with Williams's attraction to the locale was his lifelong quest to have poetry mirror the speech of the American people. Williams had no interest, he said, in the "speech of the English country people, which would have something artificial about it"; instead he sought a "language modified by our environment, the American environment." Marc Hofstadter explained: "Thinking of himself as a local poet who possessed neither the high culture nor the old-world manners of an Eliot or Pound, he sought to express his democracy through his way of speaking.... His point was to speak on an equal level with the reader, and to use the language and thought materials of America in expressing his point of view."

While Williams continued with his innovations in the American idiom and his experiments in form, he fell out of favor with some of his own contemporaries. Kora in Hell: Improvisations, for example, suffered some stinging attacks. For a year Williams had made a habit of recording something—anything—in his notebooks every night, and followed these jottings with a comment. One of "Williams's own favorite books..., the prose poetry of Kora is an extraordinary combination of aphorism, romanticism, philosophizing, obscurity, obsession, exhortation, reverie, beautiful lines and scary paragraphs," wrote Webster Schott. Yet, as Hugh Fox reported, few peers shared Williams's enthusiasm for the book. Pound called it "incoherent" and "un-American"; H.D. objected to its "flippancies," its "self-mockery," its "un-seriousness"; and Wallace Stevens complained about Williams's "tantrums." Fox defended the avant-garde Williams against his critics by saying, "Anything hitherto undone is tantrums, flippancy, opacity... they don't see (as Williams does) that they are confronting a new language and they have to learn how to decipher it before they can savor it."

Surrounded by criticism, Williams became increasingly defensive during this time. His prologue to Kora came from his need "to give some indication of myself to the people I knew; sound off, tell the world—especially my intimate friends—how I felt about them." With or without allies, Williams was determined to continue the advances he felt he had made in American poetry.

What Williams did not foresee, however, was the "atom bomb" on modern poetry—T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Williams had no quarrel with Eliot's genius—he said Eliot was writing poems as good as Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale"—but, simply, "we were breaking the rules, whereas he was conforming to the excellencies of classroom English." As he explained in his Autobiography, "I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit." Not only did Williams feel threatened by Eliot's success, but also by the attention The Waste Land received. As Karl Shapiro pointed out, "he was left high and dry: Pound, who was virtually the co-author of Eliot's poems, and Marianne Moore were now polarized to Eliot. Williams felt this and would feel it for another twenty years. His own poetry would have to progress against the growing orthodoxy of Eliot criticism." But while the Eliot wave undoubtedly sank his spirits, at the same time it buoyed his determination: "It was a shock to me that he was so tremendously successful," Williams admitted. "My contemporaries flocked to him—away from what I wanted. It forced me to be successful."

According to Breslin, The Waste Land was one of the "major influence[s] on that remarkable volume," Williams's next book, Spring and All. The last in a decade of experimental poetry, Spring and All viewed the same American landscape as did Eliot but interpreted it differently. Williams "saw his poetic task was to affirm the self-reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world," Stauffer noted. "But unlike Eliot, who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth."

Fox explained how Williams used the imagination to do just that: "Williams... sees the real function of the imagination as breaking through the alienation of the near at hand and reviving its wonder." Williams himself explained in one of Spring and All's prose passages that "imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it a description nor an evocation of objects or situations, it is to say that poetry does not tamper with the world but moves it—It affirms reality most powerfully and therefore, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the indestructibility of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but—."

Just as meeting Pound had measurably affected Williams's early life, the appearance of Eliot's The Waste Land marked important changes in his mid-career. Though some of Williams's finest poetry appeared in the 1923 Spring and All, he did not release another book of poems for nearly ten years. "One reason," speculated Rod Townley, "was probably Eliot's success. Another may have been his own success, known only to a few, in Spring and All. For decades thereafter he could not outdo himself; some think he never did." Instead, Williams wrote prose. And in it he concentrated on one subject in particular: America.

Williams explained his attraction towards America in a 1939 letter to Horace Gregory: "Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressedly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it." He later echoed this sentiment in his preface to Selected Essays. "I loved my father but never forgave him for remaining, in spite of everything, a British subject," Williams admitted. "It had much to do with my sometimes violent partisanship towards America." As a result of such feelings, reasoned Vivienne Koch, "the logic of Williams' allegiance to the quest for a knowledge of localism, for a defining of the American grain, has compelled in his fiction a restriction to American materials."

So, in In the American Grain, Williams tried "to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify" by examining the "original records" of "some of the American founders." In its treatment of the makers of American history, ranging from Columbus to Lincoln, In the American Grain has impressed many as Williams's most succinct definition of America and its people. D. H. Lawrence, for example, learned from Williams that "there are two ways of being American, and the chief... is by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the Puritan way. The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way." Another prose book of the period, A Voyage to Pagany, was a type of travel book based on the author's 1924 trip to Europe. "While its subject matter is essentially Europe," informed Koch, "it is, in reality, an assessment of that world through the eyes of America too." Williams focused directly on America and the Depression in his aptly titled short story collection, The Knife of the Times. In these stories and in other similar works of the thirties, "Williams blamed the inadequacies of American culture for both the emotional and economic plight of many of his subjects," declared James Guimond.

Williams's novel trilogy, White Mule, In the Money, and The Build-Up, also focused on America, and on one family in particular—his wife's. He first conceived the idea for White Mule because he wanted to write about a baby—he delivered more than two thousand in his career—and had heard stories of Floss's babyhood. But beyond the story of the infant Floss Stecher is the story of her infant American family, immigrants growing toward success in America. Philip Rahv gave this description of Joe and Gurlie Stecher: "Gurlie is so rife with the natural humors of a wife that she emerges as a veritable goddess of the home, but since it is an American home she is constantly urging her husband to get into the game, beat the other fellow, and make money. Joe's principal motivation, however, is his pride of workmanship; he is the pure artisan, the man who has not yet been alienated from the product of his labor and who thinks of money as the reward of labor and nothing else." In In the Money Williams follows Joe as he establishes his own printing business and moves to the suburbs, making way for the picture of middle-class life he presents in The Build-Up. W. T. Schott gave these examples of Williams's focus: "The stolid admirable Joe, the arrogant Gurlie on her upward march in society, a neighbor woman ranting her spitefulness,... Flossie and her sister at their little-girl wrangling over bathroom privileges." Reed Whittemore felt that such moments reveal Williams's fond tolerance of middle-class life. The Build-Up does have its "tough sections," Whittemore admitted, but "its placidness is striking for a book written by a long-time literary dissenter. What it is is a book of complacent reflection written from inside apple-pie America. It has not the flavor of the letters of the real young doctor-poet sitting in his emptiness forty years earlier in Leipzig.... Between 1909, then, and the time of the writing of The Build-Up WCW was taken inside, and found that with reservations he liked it there."

One reservation Williams may have had about middle-class America—and Rutherford in particular—was its reception of him as a poet. Few in Rutherford had any awareness of who Williams-the-poet was, and beyond Rutherford his reputation fared no better: even after he had been writing for nearly thirty years, he was still virtually an unknown literary figure. Rod Townley reported a typical public response to his early works: "The world received his sixth and seventh books as it had the five before them, in silence." At times, Williams took a resilient view of his own obscurity. In a 1938 letter to Alva Turner (one of the many amateur poets with whom he frequently corresponded), Williams assessed the profits of the pen: "Meanwhile I receive in royalties for my last two books the munificent sum of one hundred and thirty dollars—covering the work of a ten or fifteen year period, about twelve dollars a year. One must be a hard worker to be able to stand up under the luxury of those proportions. Nothing but the best for me!" Beneath the shell of this attitude, though, lay a much angrier Williams. Obviously bitter about the success of Eliot and the attention Eliot stole from him and others, Williams wrote, "Our poems constantly, continuously and stupidly were rejected by all the pay magazines except Poetry and The Dial." As a result, Williams founded and edited several magazines of his own throughout the lean years. Until the 1940s and after, when his work finally received some popular and critical attention, the magazines provided a small but important readership.

While the many years of writing may have gone largely unnoticed, they were hardly spent in vain: Breslin revealed that "Williams spent some thirty years of living and writing in preparation for Paterson." And though some dismiss the "epic" label often attached to the five-book poem, Williams's intentions were certainly beyond the ordinary. His devotion to understanding his country, its people, its language—"the whole knowable world about me"—found expression in the poem's central image, defined by Whittemore as "the image of the city as a man, a man lying on his side peopling the place with his thoughts." With roots in his 1926 poem "Paterson," Williams took the city as "my 'case' to work up. It called for a poetry such as I did not know, it was my duty to discover or make such a context on the 'thought.'"

In his prefatory notes to the original four-book Paterson, Williams explained "that a man himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody—if imaginatively conceived—any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions." A. M. Sullivan outlined why Williams chose Paterson, New Jersey: It was once "the prototype of the American industrial community... the self-sustaining city of skills with the competitive energy and moral stamina to lift the burdens of the citizen and raise the livelihood with social and cultural benefits." One hundred years later, continued Sullivan, "Williams saw the Hamilton concept [of 'The Society of Useful Manufacturers'] realized, but with mixed results of success and misery. The poet of Paterson understood the validity of the hopes of Hamilton but also recognized that the city slum could be the price of progress in a mechanized society." The world Williams chose to explore in this poem about "the myth of American power," added James Guimond, was one where "this power is almost entirely evil, the destructive producer of an America grown pathetic and tragic, brutalized by inequality, disorganized by industrial chaos, and faced with annihilation."

Williams revealed "the elemental character of the place" in Book I. The time is spring, the season of creativity, and Paterson is struck by the desire to express his "immediate locality" clearly, observed Guimond. The process is a struggle: to know the world about him Paterson must face both the beauty of the Passaic Falls and the poverty of the region. In Book II, said Williams, Paterson moves from a description of "the elemental character" of the city to its "modern replicas." Or, as Guimond pointed out, from the "aesthetic world" to the "real material world where he must accomplish the poet's task as defined in Book I—the invention of a language for his locality.... The breakdown of the poet's communication with his world is a disaster," both for himself and for others. Williams himself, on the other hand, made his own advance in communication in Book II, a "milestone" in his development as a poet. A passage in Section 3, beginning "The descent beckons...," "brought about—without realizing it at the time—my final conception of what my own poetry should be." The segment is one of the earliest examples of Williams's innovative method of line division, the "variable foot."

To invent the new language, Paterson must first "descend from the erudition and fastidiousness that made him impotent in Book II," summarized Guimond. As Paterson reads—and reflects—in a library, he accepts the destruction in Book II, rejects his learning, and realizes "a winter of 'death' must come before spring." Williams believed that "if you are going to write realistically of the concept of filth in the world it can't be pretty." And so, Book IV is the dead season, symbolized by the "river below the falls," the polluted Passaic. But in this destruction, the poet plants some seeds of renewal: a young virtuous nurse; a Paterson poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has promised to give the local new meaning; Madame Curie, "divorced from neither the male nor knowledge." At the conclusion of Book IV, a man, after a long swim, dresses on shore and heads inland—"toward Camden," Williams said, "where Walt Whitman, much traduced, lived the later years of his life and died." These seeds of hope led Breslin to perceive the basic difference between Paterson and Williams's long-time nemesis, Eliot's Waste Land. "'The Waste Land' is a kind of anti-epic," Breslin said, "a poem in which the quest for meaning is entirely thwarted and we are left, at the end, waiting for the collapse of Western civilization. Paterson is a pre-epic, showing that the process of disintegration releases forces that can build a new world. It confronts, again and again, the savagery of contemporary society, but still affirms a creative seed. Eliot's end is Williams's beginning."

Williams scrapped his plans for a four-book Paterson when he recognized not only the changes in the world, but "that there can be no end to such a story I have envisioned with the terms which I have laid down for myself." To Babette Deutsch, Book V "is clearly not something added on, like a new wing built to extend a house, but something that grew, as naturally as a green branch stemming from a sturdy ole tree.... This is inevitably a work that reviews the past, but it is also one that stands firmly in the present and looks toward the future.... 'Paterson Five' is eloquent of a vitality that old age cannot quench. Its finest passages communicate Dr. Williams's perennial delight in walking in the world." Book VI was in the planning stages at the time of Williams's death.

While Williams himself declared that he had received some "gratifying" compliments about Paterson, Breslin reported "reception of the poem never exactly realized his hopes for it." Paterson's mosaic structure, its subject matter, and its alternating passages of poetry and prose helped fuel criticism about its difficulty and its looseness of organization. In the process of calling Paterson an "'Ars Poetica' for contemporary America," Dudley Fitts complained, "it is a pity that those who might benefit most from it will inevitably be put off by its obscurities and difficulties." Breslin, meanwhile, accounted for the poem's obliqueness by saying," Paterson has a thickness of texture, a multi-dimensional quality that makes reading it a difficult but intense experience."

Paterson did help bring Williams some of the attention he had been missing for many years. One honor came in 1949 when he was invited to become consultant to the Library of Congress. Whittemore reported that Williams first refused the appointment because of poor health, but decided in 1952 that he was ready to assume the post. Unfortunately for Williams, the editor and publisher of the poetry magazine Lyric got word of Williams's appointment and subsequently announced Williams's "Communist" affiliations. Williams's poem "Russia," she insisted, spoke in "the very voice of Communism." Though few newspapers brought the charges to light, the Library of Congress suddenly backed off from the appointment. After several excuses and postponements, some made, ostensibly, out of a concern for Williams's health, Librarian Luther Evans wrote, "I accordingly hereby revoke the offer of appointment heretofore made to you." A few months before the term was to have ended, Williams learned that the appointment had been renewed. The Library of Congress, however, made no offer to extend the appointment through the following year.

While Williams may have felt abandoned when few came to his defense during the Library of Congress incident, little could have bolstered him the way the cult of third generation poets did when they adopted him as their father in poetry. " Paterson is our Leaves of Grass," announced Robert Lowell. "The times have changed." And indeed they had. The dominant school of poetry, the academic school of Eliot and Allen Tate, was giving way to what Whittemore called the fifties' "Revolution of the Word." Such poets as Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Cid Corman found in Williams an alternative to the academics. As Bruce Cook explained, Williams "withstood the influence of Eliot, ignored the New Critics and the academic poets who followed their lead, and simply went his own way, his lines growing shorter, more austere, more pointed with each poem." With this style, reported James Dickey, he appealed to many aspiring writers who looked at his work and said, "Well if that's poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!" But while the younger poets, including the Beats, found a prophet, a father, and a personal friend in Williams, the old master was no easy critic. "It was Williams who told Ginsberg that 'Howl' needed cutting by half," disclosed Linda Wagner.

According to Williams himself, his own special gift to the new poets was his "variable foot—the division of the line according to a new method that would be satisfactory to an American." He revealed his enthusiasm over the variable foot in a 1955 letter to John Thirlwall: "As far as I know, as my forthcoming book [ Journey to Love] makes clear, I shall use no other form for the rest of my life, for it represents the culmination of all my striving after an escape from the restrictions of all the verse of the past." Breslin, meanwhile, downplayed Williams's exuberance: "A reader coming to these poems [in The Desert Music and Other Poems] across the whole course of Williams's development will recognize that the new line is simply one manifestation of a pervasive shift of style and point of view." Whittemore, too, while heralding Williams as a prophet in the "Revolution of the Word," de-emphasized the role of the variable foot: "In other words the variable foot represented a change in mood more than measure."

Williams's health accounts for a major change in mood. In the late 1940s he suffered the first of several heart attacks and strokes which would plague him for the rest of his life. And though Williams later complained of the effects of a particularly serious stroke (1952)—"That was the end. I was through with life"—his devotion to poetry did not suffer. Breslin reported that after retiring from medicine in 1951, and after recuperating from a stroke, Williams spoke "optimistically of the 'opportunity for thought' and reading afforded by his new idleness." Hofstadter pointed out that "death was a major focus of this reflectiveness," and explained how Williams reflected his concerns in his poetry: "In the face of death what Williams seeks is renewal—not a liberation toward another world but an intensified return to this one. Revitalization both of one's inner energies and of one's contact with the outside world, renewal is the product of two forces: love and the imagination.... Love and imagination are the essence of life. He who loses them is as good as dead."

Williams explored the theme of renewed love in two particular later works, the play A Dream of Love and the poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." In A Dream of Love the protagonist has an affair with his secretary and confesses to his wife that he did it only to "renew our love." The explanation fails to convince her. Thus, Williams dramatizes his belief in the "conflict between the male's need for emotional renewal in love and the female's need for constancy in love," explained Guimond. According to Thomas Whitaker, "'A Dream of Love' points to an actuality that Williams at this time could not fully face but that he would learn to face—most noticeably in 'Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.'" In this "elegiac epithalamian," Williams confesses his infidelities to his wife and asks for her forgiveness; "he seeks new life on the very edge of death," said Whitaker. While Williams proclaimed his life as a husband in his love poem, his strength as a poet was evident, too: "Asphodel" received some very complimentary reviews, including W. H. Auden's praise as "one of the most beautiful poems in the language."

"Asphodel" was among several of Williams's highly esteemed later works. Prior to his 1952 stroke he had been under a taxing three-book contract at Random House, a contract he fulfilled with The Build Up, Autobiography, and Make Light of It. The hurried writing of the Autobiography, evidenced by its many factual mistakes, as well as the worry over the Library of Congress debacle, have both been cited as contributing factors in his declining health.

But Williams's weakened physical powers, apparently, strengthened his creative ones. "I think he did much better work after the stroke slowed him down," reflected Flossie. Stanley Koehler agreed. The Desert Music and Journey to Love, he said, "were written in an unusual period of recovery of creative power after Dr. Williams's first serious illness in 1952." Aside from featuring the variable foot and such outstanding poems as "Asphodel," these two books impressed readers as the mature work of a poet very much in control of his life and craft. Reviewing Desert Music, Kenneth Rexroth called the title poem "an explicit statement of the irreducible humaneness of the human being." The book's ideas are "simple, indisputable, presented with calm maturity," continued Rexroth. "I prophesy that from now on, as Williams grows older, he will rise as far above his contemporaries as Yeats did in his later years." The love poems of Journey to Love were no less impressive to Babette Deutsch. "The poet gives us vignettes of the daily scene, notations on the arts, affirmations of a faith no less sublime for being secular, in the language, the rhythms, that he has made his own," reported Deutsch. "The pages bear the indelible signature of his honesty, his compassion, his courage." Finally, to highlight a decade of productivity, Williams's last book, Pictures From Brueghel, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

Despite his failing health, Williams lived as productively as possible throughout his later years. He traveled, gave lectures, and entertained writers in the same home that had been visited by members of the Imagist movement more than forty years earlier. Williams wrote, too—poetry, of course, as well as essays and short stories. He continued to cooperate with writers interested in him and his work: John Thirlwall worked with him in the publication of Selected Letters and a series of discussions with Edith Heal became the "autobiography" of his works, I Wanted to Write a Poem. A partially paralyzing stroke in 1958 and a 1959 cancer operation, however, stole much of his remaining energy and capabilities. No longer able to read, by the end of the decade he depended on Floss to read to him, often as long as four hours a day. A particularly painful view of the aging Williams appeared in his 1962 interview with Stanley Koehler for the Paris Review. "The effort it took the poet to find and pronounce words can hardly be indicated here," reported Koehler. Continued failing health further slowed Williams until, on March 4, 1963, he died in his sleep.

Revealed: Prince William also receives highly sensitive cabinet papers

Second in line to the throne is sent confidential papers from the very top of government ‘occasionally’ and ‘when relevant’

 

Officials have justified Prince William’s access to highly sensitive cabinet papers because he is future heir to the throne. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/AFP/Getty Images

Prince William receives highly sensitive cabinet papers as well as his father,Prince Charles, it has emerged.

The second in line to the throne is sent confidential papers from the very top of government “occasionally” and “when relevant”, a royal source confirmed.

This follows news of the little-known access granted to Charles to the highest-level government dossiers, which was exposed in the Guardian on Tuesday after a three-year freedom of information battle by Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state.

The government justified Charles’s access to the high level cabinet memorandums, which even ministers of state do not see, because he was heir to the throne.

On Wednesday night it said William’s access was because he was “future heir to the throne”. The Guardian understands the amount of material William receives is more modest than that given to Charles or the Queen and includes material relating to countries where he is engaged in official overseas visits.

“The Duke of Cambridge is a senior member of the royal family and future heir to the throne and therefore of course it is appropriate that he is regularly briefed on government business,” a Cabinet Office spokesman said.

But Republic’s chief executive, Graham Smith, said: “There appears to be no good reason why William is getting this information. There is no mention of this access in the documents released this week. It appears to be a free-for-all.”

Labour has called for an inquiry, which Smith supports “so we can know how much information is being handed to which royals”.

Charles “is one of the most powerful lobbyists in the country and he has more information than some of the ministers he is lobbying”, said Clive Lewis MP, a shadow minister. “That is not right or proper. There needs to be more transparency about his powers and his access to confidential briefings. Who authorises them and why has it been kept secret? It undermines public confidence in our democratic processes if you have to drag this information kicking and screaming into the daylight.”

On Wednesdsay night the Cabinet Office declined to confirm or deny whether William was receiving cabinet files or comment on whether any other royals were.

Prof Adam Tomkins, a constitutional lawyer, said Charles risked damaging the monarchy if he used the highly confidential cabinet papers to assist his lobbying.

Tomkins, a professor of public law at Glasgow University, said: “The heir to the throne has unique access, with the Queen, both to government papers and to ministers. Were they minded to do so, they would be able to use that access to lobby.

“The Queen has acted in an exemplary manner by not doing that and Charles should behave like she does. To the extent that he doesn’t, he risks damaging the institution of the monarchy.”

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative chairman of the House of Commons constitutional affairs committee, said ministers should have been more openabout Charles’s access, but added that it was outrageous to describe him as a lobbyist. Jenkin said: “He only acts in the public interest. It is his view of the public interest but I expect the vast majority of this country support that.”

Jenkin is facing calls from a Labour member of his committee, Paul Flynn, to investigate Charles’s access to cabinet papers. Flynn warned that there was “a great nervousness” among parliamentarians about raising the issue of Charles’s interaction with government “because it is so full of matters that are illogical and indefensible and people don’t want to disturb it”.

Ed Davey, the former Liberal Democrat MP, who had two private meetings with Charles while he was secretary of state for energy and climate change, said he was “very relaxed” about Charles receiving the papers. He said Charles was “very well informed and not just from the cabinet papers”.

“We were in total agreement on our views and I didn’t feel lobbied,” he said. “If I was against taking action on climate change the meetings might have been more frustrating.”

Prince George the new Harry? Prince William says son is cheeky while Charlotte 'a lady'

Prince William portrayed his children as two very different characters today when he returned to the Cambridge University college where he studied agricultural management.

            

Getty Prince William reportedly said that Prince George is very lively and Charlotte is very lady-like

The Duke of Cambridge, who went to St John's College to open a new archive centre housing historic documents, suggested five-month-old Princess Charlotte was rather more delicate than her two-year-old bruiser of a brother, Prince George.

Professor Christopher Dobson, the Master of St John's, who hosted William, 33, during his visit, said: "We talked a little bit about the children and he did make a couple of comments about their different temperaments.

"He said George is very lively and Charlotte is very lady-like. He said they were both delightful of course."

 First ever photograph of the Queen as a playful young toddler to...

                               The Queen and Prince Harry meet with rugby royalty to mark the...                                                                                                                     

                       

  Getty Prince William (left) as a child and Prince George (right) in similar clothes

Prof Dobson gave William a book to read to his children, called Fitz and Will the Cambridge Cats, about two cats that sneak into a graduation ceremony at St John's.

He said George is very lively and Charlotte is very lady-like. He said they were both delightful of course

Professor Christopher Dobson

He mentioned that a dog in the story looked rather like Lupo, the Cambridges' cocker spaniel, and the Duke smiled, saying: "There wouldn't be any of the lawn left if it was Lupo."

William, who studied a bespoke 10-week course in agricultural management at the college last year to help prepare him for his future role as Prince of Wales in charge of the135,000 acre Duchy of Cornwall estate, was invited back to open the college's new archive centre, housed in a 13th century building known as the School of Pythagoras.

It contains college documents dating back to the medieval era and includes a 14th century copy of the Magna Carta, discovered only this year. It was on display for William to see but he got nervous at the prospect of handling it. "I shan't touch it, just in case," he said.

Getty Prince William opening the School of Pythagoras Archive Centre at St John's College, Cambridge

The archive is part of a £70m renovation project at the college. At a brief reception William met donors as well as those who have worked on the archive.

Prof Dobson said: "The archive really grabbed his interest. He said he could imagine spending two or three days there looking at all the manuscripts and documents."

Prof Dobson also gave the Duke a navy and gold college tie. "I'll wear my tie to the rugby," said a pleased-as-punch William, who is following Wales during the Rugby World Cup.

Asked if he would like George and Charlotte to follow in their father's footsteps and study at St John's one day, Prof Dobson said: "We take them younger and younger, so you never know."

Prince William Biography

Prince William is the eldest son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles of Wales, and is next in line for the British throne after his father.

Prince William - Mini Biography (TV-14; 3:03) Prince William is the eldest son of Prince Charles and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. After enrolling at St. Andrews, he met Kate Middleton, the woman he married on April 29, 2011.

Synopsis
Prince William is the eldest son of Princess Diana and Prince Charles of Wales and is the next in line to the British throne after his father. He was strongly affected by his parents' divorce in 1996 and his mother's tragic death in 1997 and expressed discomfort at the growing attention he received as he reached adulthood. William served in the Royal Air Force and supports numerous charities. On April 29, 2011, he made international headlines when he married his college sweetheart, Kate Middleton, at Westminster Abbey. The couple's son Prince George, third in line to the throne, was born on July 22, 2013. Their second child, a daughter, was born on May 2, 2015.

Early Life
Prince William was born Prince William Arthur Philip Louis Windsor on June 21, 1982, in London, England, the eldest son of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Charles, Prince of Wales. His official title is "His Royal Highness Prince William of Wales."

William attended Mrs. Mynor's Nursery school in West London (1985-87), Wetherby School in Kensington, London (1987-90), and Ludgrove School in Wokingham (1990-95). In 1995, at the urging of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince William (nicknamed "Wills") entered Eton College, one of England's most prestigious secondary schools. A serious student with excellent grades, he also excelled in sports at Eton, particularly swimming. With his father and brother, he enjoys outdoor sports including riding, skiing, shooting and fishing.

As he is directly in line to the British throne after his father, Charles, he spends a good deal of time at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth, who is very concerned with his upbringing and career development.

Affected by both his parents' divorce in 1996 and his mother's tragic death in 1997, the tall and handsome young William publicly stated his dislike for the press, and expressed discomfort with the growing attention he received from love-struck adolescent girls. William gives the impression of being a well-mannered, responsible and mature young man who shows a strong sense of duty and loyalty to the royal family, fully aware of the role he is to play in the future as the King of England.

Military Service and Philanthropy
Upon his graduation from Eton, William took a break from his studies to visit South America and Africa. He then attended Scotland's St Andrew's University, where he received a degree in geography in 2005. Following in the footsteps of his younger brother, Prince Harry, William joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as a military cadet and received his commission as a second lieutenant in the Household Cavalry in December 2006. In 2008, he was appointed to be a Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. He is now training to be a search and rescue pilot with the Royal Air Force.

Along with his military career, William supports numerous charities, including serving as patron to Centrepoint, an organization for homeless youth, and the Tusk Trust, which is dedicated to the preservation of African wildlife. In 2007, William and his brother Harry hosted a special concert to celebrate their late mother and raise funds for charities that Princess Diana supported during her life as well as charities supported by the princes.

Kate Middleton
As the future king of England, William's personal life has been the subject of much media attention. He had been romantically linked to Kate Middleton; the couple met while attending St. Andrew's University. Rumors of a possible engagement swirled around the pair for months, but to the surprise of royal watchers, the couple announced that they were splitting up in April 2007. However, in the time since that announcement, Middleton had attended several public and official events, as well as traveled on vacation with Prince William. Speculation about a wedding engagement between Prince William and Kate Middleton continued to swell.

On November 16, 2010, it was announced that Prince William and Kate Middleton were engaged. Prince William had popped the question in October during a holiday in Kenya, using his mother's engagement ring. It was also stated that the couple would live in North Wales, where Prince William is stationed with the Royal Air Force. Middleton is not of royal or aristocratic lineage, which is a break from longtime royal tradition.

With his marriage at Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011, the Queen officially conferred her grandson with the title William, Duke of Cambridge, as well as the additional titles Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus.
Royal Pregnancy

On December 3, 2012, after almost a year of baby rumors and much speculation, St. James Palace officially announced that Prince William and Kate Middleton were pregnant with their first child.

Prince William's child with Middleton will be the Queen's third great-grandchild and will be the third in line, next to Prince Charles and Prince William, to become heir to the throne.

"Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to announce that The Duchess of Cambridge is expecting a baby," the official statement confirmed the pregnancy. "The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh, The Prince of Wales, The Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Harry and members of both families are delighted with the news."

In September 2014, the couple announced that Kate Middleton was pregnant with their second child.
Royal Births

Anticipating the arrival of Middleton and Prince William's first born, international media outlets camped out in front of St. Mary's Hospital in Paddington at the beginning of July 2013. St. Mary's was the same hospital where Princess Diana gave birth to Prince William and later Prince Harry.

On July 22, 2013, the palace announced Middleton had given birth to a baby boy, weighing in at 8 pounds and 6 ounces, at 4:24 p.m. local time. Two days later, the baby's name was revealed: George Alexander Louis, who will be known as "His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge."

Nearly two months after his son's birth, Prince William announced that he would be leaving the military. He has decided to focus on his royal responsibilities and his charity work. According to BBC News, Prince William will devote much of his energy to wildlife conservation. He explained that "The threats to our natural heritage are extensive, but I believe that this collaboration of the best minds in conservation will provide the impetus for a renewed commitment and action to protect endangered species and habitats for future generations."

While still maintaining his royal duties, Prince William announced in 2014 that he would be taking a position as a pilot for Bond Air Services, an air ambulance company. He started training for the position in 2015. With this new role, Prince William is believed to be the first British royal heir to work in the private sector. His salary will be donated to charity.

Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge welcomed their second child on May 2, 2015. The Duchess gave birth to a daughter, Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, weighing 8 pounds, 3 ounces, at 8:34 a.m. local time at St Mary's Hospital. The baby is the Queen's fifth great-grandchild and the fourth in line to the throne after her brother Prince George.

Prince William

Prince William is the elder son of The Prince of Wales and the late Diana, Princess of Wales. On 29 April 2011, following his marriage to Catherine Middleton, the title The Duke of Cambridge was conferred on him by The Queen.

He was born at 9.03pm on 21 June 1982, at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London. A bulletin announced that the Royal baby weighed 7lb 1 1/2oz.

On 4 August 1982, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis was christened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie, in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace.

After attending Mrs Mynors School, The Duke became a pupil at Wetherby School in London, from 15 January 1987 until 5 July 1990.

From September 1990, The Duke attended Ludgrove School in Berkshire, for five years until 5 July 1995. He then attended Eton College from July 1995 and studied Geography, Biology and History of Art at A Level.

The Duke was 15-years-old when Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997. The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry walked behind their mother’s cortege at her funeral which was held at Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997.

After a gap year in which he visited Chile, Belize, worked on British dairy farms and visited countries in Africa, The Duke chose to study at St Andrews University in Fife, Scotland. He graduated with a 2:1 in Geography in 2005.

After a period of work experience, The Duke of Cambridge joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst as an Officer Cadet.

He was commissioned as an army officer in front of The Queen at Sandhurst in December 2006 and joined the Household Cavalry (Blues and Royals) as a Second Lieutenant.

He went on to train as an RAF Search and Rescue Pilot with the RAF, graduating as a fully operational pilot in September 2010. The Duke is a fully operational Search and Rescue Pilot with the Royal Air Force, based at Anglesey, Wales.

At the same time, The Duke of Cambridge is President or Patron to a number of charities and organisations whose work he wishes to support.

His Royal Highness married Miss Catherine Middleton on 29th April 2011. The couple are now known as The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

On 29th May 2012, The Duke of Cambridge said he was 'honoured' to be conferred to the Order of the Thistle in the year of The Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were delighted to announce the birth of their first child, George Alexander Louis, on 22 July 2013. Their second child, Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, was born on 2 May 2015. Both children were born at the Lindo Wing, St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

Prince William and Kate to visit charity-run cafe in Caernarfon

The Royal couple will meet some of Gisda’s young people and staff at the centre, known as Te a Cofi

                                                               The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

A training centre run by a charity dedicated to supporting and accommodating homeless youngsters will be one of the places visited by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in Caernarfon later this week .
Prince William and his wife Kate will meet some of Gisda’s young people and staff at the centre, known as Te a Cofi.

They are already patrons of one of the charity's partner organisations in England, Centrepoint, which undertakes similar work to Gisda.

Te a Cofi is a café and catering training centre that offers young people work experience and training opportunities.

Gisda chief executive Sian Tomos said: “There isn’t a better feeling in the world than to see a young person flourish especially after overcoming some pretty difficult barriers.

“Like many other charities Gisda is facing extremely challenging times, as a result of severe funding cuts, the level of services that we can offer young people will inevitably be affected.

"In light of these impending cuts, Gisda sees this as a unique opportunity to showcase the invaluable work that is being done at the present.

“All of Gisda’s projects contribute to the Welsh Government national agenda to tackle poverty and therefore it’s vitally important that the investment in our services continues. The need is there.

“The visit reflects the Duke and Duchess’ particular interest in work done to help young people, investing in their future, making sure that they receive adequate and timely support in early adulthood to prevent the development of more serious problems.”

Gisda was established in 1985 to provide support and accommodation for homeless young people in the area.

Since then, the charity has developed many other supporting projects. During the last year alone its services have reached 2,000 young people.

The various social enterprises provides further opportunities for young people such as our cleaning company Sglein (Shine), Cinematic – inflatable cinema, painting and decorating, sandwich van and Te a Cofi.

Prince William and his wife Kate are due to visit Caernarfon on Friday and will also see the work done during art projects run by both Ynys Mon and Gwynedd Mind. They will also visit the Vale of Clwyd Mind Men’s Shed project in Denbigh

Charles and Di's 'secret daughter': Wills and Harry are claimed to have an IVF sister living in hiding according to outlandish story gripping US... so is there a single scrap of evidence?

This weekend, the nation is poised to celebrate the birth of a new royal baby. The Duchess of Cambridge, having already provided us with the heir — a bonny future king in the person of Prince

George — is about to complete her dynastic duty by delivering ‘the spare’.
Under the terms of the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which now allows females the same priority in the order of succession as males, the new baby, even if it is a girl — as William and Kate are rumoured to be hoping — will be fourth in line to the throne, after Charles, William and George, and will maintain that position regardless of the birth of future sons to the Cambridges.

But is this really the case? Certainly not if you pay attention to sensational and scandalous claims that have been circulating in the U.S., and are now making headlines in Spain and other parts of Europe.

Prepare to suspend your disbelief for a moment. For it is alleged that Prince William was not his mother’s first child: that he has a ‘secret sister’, now 33, called Sarah and living incognito in a small New England town in the United States.

How, you may well wonder, can this possibly be true when William was born in June 1982, only 11 months after his parents’ marriage?

The answer, according to this unbelievable claim, is that in December 1980, Lady Diana Spencer, then a 19-year-old virgin, was ordered by the Queen to undergo gynaecological tests to establish that she was capable of bearing children before her engagement to the heir to the throne could be announced.

During these tests, so the story goes, Diana’s eggs were harvested and fertilised with Prince Charles’s sperm. The tests proved successful, and the engagement of Charles and Diana was duly announced. Charles, asked if they were in love, responded with his famously cynical observation, ‘Whatever in love means’ — and the embryos were ordered to be destroyed.

But one of the team who examined Diana, a ‘rogue doctor’, secretly held one of the embryos back and implanted it in his own wife. Unknown to her, she became the surrogate mother of the biological child of Charles and Diana.

The baby, a girl, was born in October 1981, ten weeks after Charles and Diana’s fairy-tale wedding on July 29 of that year, and eight months before William’s own birth on June 21, 1982, in the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where fans are already camping out to catch the first glimpse of Kate and William emerging with their new baby.

There’s more. Sarah is reported as claiming that as she was growing up, she was always being told that she was ‘a dead ringer’ for Diana. Then, in her late 20s, her parents were both killed in a car accident. After their deaths, she came across a diary which revealed that she was the product of a donated embryo and of in vitro fertilisation (IVF), which was still in its infancy in the early 1980s.

Ridiculous: The story goes that an embryo was fertilised to check the Royal couple were able to have a child - but was meant to be destroyed. Only it wasn't, and a doctor implanted his own wife with the 'royal'

Sarah says that she attempted to trace the origin of the donated embryo to find out who she really was. But about two years ago, a menacing message was left on her answer-phone, warning her to stop looking if she valued her life.
It’s almost comic. But this tasteless nonsense — part of a long history of ghoulish exploitation of William and Harry’s adored mother — seems particularly tawdry at a time when Kate is about to give birth to Diana’s second grandchild.

Terrified by the thought that her life might be in danger, and haunted by suggestions that Diana’s death in Paris was not an accident but murder, she emigrated to America, where she now lives under a secret identity.

This is the extraordinary account that we are being asked to believe. Far-fetched though it sounds, could there be any truth in it?

As with all conspiracy theories — particularly those relating to Princess Diana’s death — there is always a narrow basis in fact. On her own admission, Diana did undergo a gynaecological examination before her engagement to Charles.

‘I had to be checked out before they would let me marry him,’ she told a close friend, Elsa, Lady Bowker, who was also a friend of mine.

The examination was almost certainly carried out by the late Sir George Pinker, the Queen’s highly respected surgeon-gynaecologist. Understandably, its purpose was to confirm that there was no malformation of the womb or uterus, or anything that might preclude normal child-bearing.

That such an examination would ever have gone to the extreme of harvesting eggs and in vitro fertilisation seems incredible, though one cannot state as a fact that such a procedure did not take place.

Beautiful archive footage shows wedding of Diana and Charles

Future queen: The tale goes as far as to claim the girl - named 'Sarah' - could even have a stronger claim to the throne, having been 'born' before the Duke of Cambridge, pictured here with his mother and brother Harry

Not quite: However, in one of the stories numerous holes, it fails to recognise the amended rules of succession, allowing the eldest child to succeed regardless of gender, are only backdated to 2011. So Prince George - along with his father, pictured with the family at George's christening - doesn't need to worry

The whole story of the secret baby began as fiction — which is perhaps where it ought to have remained. In 2011, a former New York businesswoman, Nancy E. Ryan, living in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, self-published a novel entitled The Disappearance Of Olivia.

Mrs Ryan, who never met Princess Diana, had been fascinated by the first in vitro baby, Louise Joy Brown, born in Oldham in 1978. She considered Diana ‘one of the most fascinating women in my lifetime’ and had ‘read many stories about Princess Diana wishing she had a daughter’.

All this was surely on her mind when she conceived the story of Olivia Franklin, an oncologist who ‘admired Princess Diana and wanted to emulate her’. Her task becomes somewhat easier when she discovers she is Diana’s secret daughter — the result of fertility tests and procedures which somehow led to another woman being implanted with a royal embryo.

In the novel, Olivia is living in hiding, fearful for her life, because of the supposed threat her existence would pose to the Royal Family.

It’s outrageous stuff even for fiction, but, in Ryan’s mind, her outlandish tale was far from risible. ‘I believe my story could have been true,’ she said. ‘Many have told me that they believe my story is entirely plausible.

‘These same people also think that Prince Charles wanted Diana to be fertile . . . that he might have pushed Diana into having her eggs harvested to prove her fertility.’

And, despite the book clearly being a work of fiction, when it was published at the end of 2011, an astonishing media metamorphosis occurred. Almost overnight, the possibility of Diana having had a secret daughter ceased to be fantasy and began to be promoted as fact.

Acquaintances: According to The Globe, a tabloid, Kate had a '44 minute' meeting with her supposed sister-in-law during a visit to the U.S. last year - and was amazed by her likeness to Princess Diana

Harry, Kate and William arrive at St. Paul's memorial service

Globe magazine, a mass-circulation supermarket tabloid published in America, devoted its entire front cover to the screaming headlines: ‘Bombshell New Book. Princess Diana’s Secret Daughter!’

Opposite a photo of Princess Diana was a picture of an attractive young girl with shoulder-length blonde hair. The girl’s face and smile bore an overwhelming resemblance to Diana.

Was it perhaps a little too overwhelming? A careful study of ‘Sarah’ — as she had started to be named in reports — revealed identical eyeliner to that used by Diana, identically placed eyes, and identical eyebrows, nose and teeth.

In support of its alleged scoop about ‘rumours the Palace has battled to keep under wraps for decades’ and the ‘amazing details about the young woman’s bizarre birth and why she’s living in hiding’, it appeared that the magazine had taken a picture of the real Diana, tilted it to a different angle and Photoshopped out the lines on her face, then superimposed it on to the body of a young girl.

And if the photograph was a fabrication, the next question to be asked, of course, was whether ‘Sarah’ existed at all — or was she simply a cynical media creation?

Mystery: Exactly how Prince Harry felt about his 'secret sister' was not revealed in the 'expose'

But the legend of Diana’s secret daughter had now been given lift-off into that stratosphere where bizarre rumours are instantly believed.

Four months ago, Globe returned to the subject, devoting its front cover to the announcement, Kate Meets Diana’s Secret Daughter!, again with the computer-created photograph of the elusive ‘Sarah’, who seemed remarkably unwilling to be either seen or heard.

This time the magazine assured its readers that ‘Prince William’s pregnant wife Kate carried out a top-secret mission while in New York — quietly meeting with a woman Palace insiders believe is Diana’s secret daughter’.

A ‘royal insider’ insisted: ‘This was the real reason for the couple’s trip to The Big Apple. The other events were just a cover. William wants to know the truth.’

By way of further explanation, it was alleged that Nancy Ryan’s novel ‘spurred a Palace investigator to probe the old rumours about a secret Diana baby — and the path eventually led to Sarah. That’s when William first learned of her existence.

‘Insiders say William didn’t think it “appropriate” to meet Sarah himself, so he asked Kate to have an informal private chat in New York — and arranged the trip.

‘William was stunned when Kate told him she was a mirror image of his mother and really could be his sister.’

It hardly seems necessary to point out that there is not a word of truth in any of these statements. William and Kate’s visit to the U.S. in December — the first made by either of them to New York and to Washington DC — was planned months in advance and undertaken partly on behalf of the British government.

It was certainly not arranged with the object of meeting a ‘secret sister’ whom neither William nor Kate had any reason to believe exists. The couple carried out ten official engagements during their three-day visit.

In spite of all this, the magazine insisted that Kate ‘nervously waited’ in her suite at New York’s Carlyle Hotel ‘for the arrival of the mystery woman, known as Sarah, who believes she is William’s older sister’.

‘Sources say Sarah was smuggled into Kate’s sitting room by aides under the guise of being part of the royal party’s domestic staff. And an informed insider [yet another one!] has revealed exclusively to Globe that Kate was left almost speechless at her first sight of Sarah.

‘“She’s tall, elegant and the spitting image of Princess Diana,” declares the source. “They spent exactly 44 minutes together while Sarah answered Kate’s questions about her upbringing with apparent honesty.”’

He's got good genes! Adorable photos of Prince George

Worldwide: The story - which actually began as a book - has been picked up in Spain, but is likely to be outshone when William and Kate's second baby, and George's first sibling, is born

Even if any of this story were true, can anyone believe that William — whose protective attitude towards Kate was so manifest on the day of their engagement — would allow his pregnant wife to deal alone with such a woman?

Globe magazine is also deeply unconvincing in its attempts to suggest the ‘Sarah’ saga has profound constitutional significance.

‘Sources say’, it maintains [still more of those ‘sources’] ‘the existence of a secret Diana daughter won’t sit well in the corridors of power. With historic changes in the constitution imminent, the oldest child — male or female — inherits the Crown. And that would be Sarah, if DNA tests confirm she really is a royal.’

Celebrate: Mail writer Michael Thornton argues the birth of George's brother or sister should be a time to celebrate 'not for inventions and falsehoods'

Wrong. Globe is a bit out of step over this. The Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which amended the long-established rules of succession, allowing the eldest child to succeed regardless of gender, received the Royal Assent in April 2013.

But the Act only applies retrospectively to people born after October 28, 2011, the year in which it was first tabled.

It would not apply therefore to the mythical ‘Sarah’, supposedly born in October 1981, even if she did exist. The Duke of Cambridge’s position as the future King William V would not be threatened in any way. And even if ‘Sarah’ were genuine, it is highly debatable legally whether a biological child of Charles and Diana, born from the womb of a surrogate mother, would have any right of succession to the throne.

But Globe is not about to surrender its prized myth. This month, it has returned to the saga yet again, claiming that ‘Sarah’ has now travelled to Britain for a showdown with the Prince of Wales.

With yet more shrieking front-cover headlines, it insists: Di’s Secret Daughter Confronts Charles: You Killed My Mother! The Most Shocking Royal Story Ever.

And in another highly dubious-looking photograph, a gesticulating Charles is shown apparently in conversation with a young woman with long blonde hair who has her back to the camera.

According to Globe, there is ‘surveillance camera footage’ of this encounter that ‘caught the entire confrontation on tape’. We await its release with bated breath.

And the story has been taken up in Spain, too, where a magazine called Pronto — another supermarket tabloid — has re-told the tale. One result is that an entirely sensible and well-read friend of mine called from Spain to ask if it might be true.

It’s almost comic. But this tasteless nonsense — part of a long history of ghoulish exploitation of William and Harry’s adored mother — seems particularly tawdry at a time when Kate is about to give birth to Diana’s second grandchild. Surely the time is more than overdue for the late Princess of Wales to be allowed to rest in the peace she deserves.

The nation has taken William and Kate, and Prince George, to its collective heart.

The birth of their second child should be an occasion for rejoicing and celebration, not for inventions and falsehoods that might overshadow the new young life that is about to begin.