Since World War I, the development of science and technology has accelerated the modernization of human lives, which mainly centered around cities. These trends have been featured in both films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of A Great City, 1927 and literary works like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) through a genre called ‘city symphony.’ However, William Carlos Williams who lived in the same era as his counterpart of modernists has taken a different path from that of the city symphony genre. Thus, this paper rereads William Carlos William’s poems through comparing them with the city symphony genre which was dominant in 1920’s. The paper focuses on three points: The first explores the aspect of impersonalization of the city symphony and Williams’s intimate contacts with his local individuals; the second is decontaxtualizing or dehistoricizing aspects of city symphony contrasted with Williams’s poems focusing on local histories. The third point is to compare the city symphony genre that uses avant-garde techniques to express technological utopian views toward human technological achievements with Williams’s attitude toward modern technology that affects everyday lives of his neighbors. (Hanbat National University)