From the beginning of his career as a poet, William Carlos Williams (1883~1963) was fascinated by the grotesque images subsuming horrible, bizarre, terrible, ghastly, repulsive, mysterious, ugly and surrealistic elements. The poet, who once longed to be a painter before becoming a poet, has unceasingly adopted the characteristics of the grotesque in his poetry and prose. This is explicitly revealed from his early poem “Grotesque” of 1914 to his later essay “Nicolas Calas's Illumination of the Significance of Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Delights.” of 1951. Especially, Williams feels a strong artistic affinity with the painters who create the strikingly grotesque images. A number of Williams' works clearly show an imaginative exploration of the estranged world of grotesque paintings. This is well demonstrated in the poet's essays on the painters in relation to the grotesque such as Hieronymous Bosch, Pieter Brueghel, and Pavel Tchelitchew. As he proclaims that he was “closely allied with the painters,” the grotesque acts as the source of Williams' artistic imagination, transcending the bounds of periods and genres.