Spring and All

by William Carlos Williams, C.D. Wright (Introduction)

A beautiful facsimile of the 1923 original edition which is considered "one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century". (The New York Times)

Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination — a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams’s best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, “By the road to the contagious hospital,” and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Now, almost 90 years since its first publiction, New Directions publishes this facsimile of the original 1923 Contact Press edition, featuring a new introduction by C. D. Wright.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 20th Century, School, Fiction, American, The United States Of America

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1923

About the author

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. Williams "worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician," wrote biographer Linda Wagner-Martin. During his long lifetime, Williams excelled both as a poet and a physician.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations, and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends—writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Later in his life, Williams toured the United States giving poetry readings and lectures.

In May 1963, he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small, non-profit or university press.

Williams' house in Rutherford is now on the National Register of Historic Places. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
fighting in the captain’s tower
while calypso singers laugh at them
and fishermen hold flowers…

So says Bob Dylan in “Desolation Row,” and—although I’m sure Bob meant nothing of the sort—for me William Carlos Williams will always be one of those fishermen. (Or maybe a calypso singer. Williams seems more like a fisherman to me, but I haven't quite decided.*)

While Pound and Eliot were busy abroad, fighting for American Poetry in the cultural citadels of Paris and London, the quieter types back home were busy changing the language itself. In Greenwich Village, there was Marianne Moore, filling the gardens of her precise syllabic poems with non-metrical music and more than a few “real toads”; in Hartford, Connecticut, there was Wallace Stevens, combining Whitman’s opulence with Symbolist fluidity in a search for metaphysical delight; in Franconia, New Hampshire, there was Robert Frost, transforming the blank verse of Emerson and Bryant into something ironic and modern; and, in Patterson, New Jersey, there was William Carlos Williams.

I am not sure exactly what Williams contributed to this American revolution in poetry, but, whatever it was, I’ll bet you it was the most American thing of all. There is a sinewy, vigorous quality to everything he writes, a no-nonsense concentration, a single-minded engagement of the sensibilities, that seems to efface everything—including the poet’s persona—everything but the American language itself and the object observed. As such, Williams poetry looks forward not only to Louis Zukovsky’s Objectivism, as well as Olson, Duncan, Blackburn, Levertov, Creeley and the rest of the Black Mountain school, but also to Kenneth Rexroth and the Beats (particularly Ginsberg and Snyder) and, later, to the Language Poets (like Clark Coolidge and Rae Armantrout).

But Williams influence, of course, is broader than a collection of schools. Whenever an American poet looks squarely at a thing and speaks of what he sees, he shares the spirit of William Carlos Williams.

Spring and All (1923)—published when Williams was forty—is considered his first mature work. It was originally published in France, and barely read in the U.S.A., “most of the copies that were sent to America”—as William’s biographer Paul Mariani says--were ”simply confiscated by American customs officials as foreign stuff and therefore probably salacious and destructive of American morals.” Yet today it is considered an influential early Modernist work, right up there with Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Pound’s early Cantos.

It is a strange hybrid collection—a bit of a lark, with some chapters deliberately out of order, some printed upside down—consisting of both prose and poetry. The prose (“a mixture of philosophy and nonsense,” according to Williams), devoted primarily to the distinctions between prose and poetry, is interspersed with examples of Williams’ poems, which show what real poetry should be. And the poetry itself is extraordinary.

Included here are works we think of as Williams’ finest: “on the road to the contagious hospital” (sometimes entitled “Spring and All”), “the pure products of America go crazy,” and “so much depends/upon a red wheel barrow,” to name a few. And there is a lot of other good stuff here too, much of which is seldom anthologized.

Whereas many people would take the position that prose is the vehicle of solid, objective truth and poetry is the home of fantasy and other “airy nothings”, Williams takes the opposite position: prose is the proper home of emotion (by which I believe he means rhetoric and its deliberate devices to move the heart) and poetry—properly conceived and executed—is the ebodiment of the objectively real in language. For the real, after all, is the true pursuit of the imagination.

I’ll end with two samples, one of poetry and one of prose.

XVII

Our orchestra
is the cat’s nuts—

Banjo jazz
with a nickleplated

amplifier to
soothe

the savage beast—
Get the rhythm

that sheet stuff
‘s a lot of cheese.

Man
gimme the key

and lemme loose—
I make ‘em crazy

with my harmonies—
Shoot it, Jimmy

Nobody
Nobody else

but me—
They can’t copy it.

* * * * *

What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from “reality”—such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as essential of the work, one of its words.

But this smacks too much of the nature of—This is all negative and appears to be boastful. It is not intended to be so. Rather the opposite.

The work will be in the realm of the imagination as pure as the sky is to a fisherman—A very clouded sentence. The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognizant of the whole—aware—civilized.

*I just decided. They’re all fisherman. Except for Wallace Stevens. He’s the calypso singer.

[Paul Haspel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spring is a time of rebirth and renewal; and in an intriguing little book titled Spring and All (1923), poet William Carlos Williams issues a quirky, radically original call for a sort of artistic renewal and rebirth – one predicated upon the absolute primacy of the imagination. Mixing as it does passages of prose and poetry, in a sometimes wildly unpredictable manner, Spring and All constitutes a kind of manifesto on behalf of true and total imaginative freedom. It is about 100 pages long, and it is one of the most challenging books that I have ever read.

William Carlos Williams’s career gives the lie to the old romantic conceit that, to be a “writer,” one must cut oneself off from everyday life and work, writing feverishly in one’s garret with only an occasional pause to look up with contempt at the meanderings of the “common” herd. Williams lived in and participated in the real world of human life and human endeavor. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams pursued a career as a physician, and achieved great success at it. As chief of pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital, he provided comfort and care to sick children for decades.

And while he was about it, he also became one of the pre-eminent American poets of the 20th century. Williams’s poetry, on some levels, certainly reflects the modernist idea that high art can provide some sense of order and meaning in an otherwise chaotic universe (both T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses were published in 1922, one year before Spring and All). Yet Williams’s work also has strong associations with Imagism, a movement that encouraged the artist to focus intensely on something very simple, in the hope that doing so will help the artist to arrive at some higher truth.

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” which appears in Spring and All, is worth focusing upon – both as, arguably, Williams’s most famous poem, and as a characteristic example of how his poetry brought together elements of modernism and imagism:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens (p. 74)

Here, one sees Williams’s characteristic, extremely close focus upon ordinary objects, his description of those objects in deceptively simple language – and an unstated, but unmistakable, suggestion that behind that seeming simplicity, one can find complex and profound higher truths. Rarely has a poet accomplished so much in a 4-stanza poem that is only 16 words long.

At the same time, “The Red Wheelbarrow” is not the only thing that Spring and All is about – far from it. As a manifesto, it argues for the primacy of the imagination over all other ways of trying to perceive reality. Near the beginning of the book, there is the following statement: “To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination” (p. 3). Shortly after, this statement receives the following elaboration:

And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed – To the imagination – you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply : To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force – the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to come and see. (p. 3)

I like how the speaker could be Williams himself, saying that he is addressing himself to the subject of the imagination – or could be the book itself, saying, in effect, “Take a look at me. I am a book that is addressed, dedicated, to the power of the imagination” – even if the book is formally dedicated to the modernist painter Charles Demuth, a friend of Williams.

The very organization of the prose passages of Spring and All involves a kind of rejection of the attempt to achieve “realism” through an accretion of prosaic detail. The prose part of the book begins with Chapter 19, and then moves on to Chapter XIII (with the chapter title printed upside down!), Chapter VI, Chapter 2, Chapter XIX, and so on. Williams’s playfulness is on full display here. He wants the reader to be aware that any attempt to organize reality along “rational” lines is to some extent arbitrary.

By contrast, the passages of poetry in Spring and All proceed in an orderly manner, starting with the Roman numeral I and moving forward through II, III, IV, and so on – as if to suggest that the imagination, as embodied in and expressed through poetry, can convey reality in a way that the “prosaic” mind cannot. People who have composed in the old-fashioned vein are, to Williams’s mind, “THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM.” They cannot capture life; they can only plagiarize it, in a kind of artistic cheating.

Williams insists that “Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding” (p. 28). For him, it is vital that art be nourished by imagination:

Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work, an expansion but this is not, as so many believe today a “lie”, a stupefaction, a kind of mesmerism, a thing to block out “life”, bitter to the individual, by a “vision of beauty”. It is a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstrating the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depressed before it, that his life is valuable – when completed by the imagination… (pp. 29-30).

He claims that the imagination’s “unique power is to give created forms reality, actual existence” (p. 49). Citing the career of William Shakespeare, who achieved such supreme feats of imagination in spite of coming from a thoroughly ordinary background in the English Midlands, Williams writes that Shakespeare’s “very lack of scientific training loosened his power. He was unencumbered” (p. 52). And, as if to put one final mike-drop stamp on this aspect of his anti-rationalist discussion, he concludes his disquisition on Shakespeare’s work by writing that the imagination “is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical” (p. 54).

As an example of the limitations of the rationalist approach to life, Williams at one point invokes the pioneering German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt: “I remember so distinctly the young Pole in Leipzig going with hushed breath to hear Wundt lecture – In this mass of intricate philosophic data what one of the listeners was able to maintain himself for the blinking of an eyelash. Not one. The inundation of the intelligence by masses of complicated fact is not knowledge” (p. 76). Anyone whose attention has wandered during a college or university lecture will no doubt relate to these ideas.

In contrast with the data-driven, analytical view of life represented by Wundt, Williams advocates “the imagination on which reality rides – It is the imagination – It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomitization” (pp. 76-77). And no, that last word is not a typo. Irregularities of orthography and punctuation abound in Spring and All – so much so that the book’s original publisher felt obliged to include a list of errata, as if to say, “This is how the author wrote it. I know better.”

Or does the publisher know better? My sense was that Williams was saying, subtly and mischievously, that too much focus on minutiae like grammar and mechanics can fetter the imagination; and for Williams, it’s all about the imagination. One hears in Williams’s work echoes of a fellow New Jerseyan, Walt Whitman. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Spring and All does contain some references to Spring the season; for instance, the volume’s well-known Poem I, with its famous first line “By the road to the contagious hospital” (a reference, perhaps, to Williams’s long and illustrious medical career), suggests that

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches – (p. 12)

That passage of poetry is then followed by prose passages in which the reader is told that “At any rate, now at last spring is here!” (p. 14), and, shortly afterward, that “Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here” (p. 16). Yet the season of renewal to which Williams commits this book is metaphorical rather than literal – he calls for a springtime of the mind and heart, a time of restoration centered around the power of the imagination.

It was a challenge to the industrial, mechanical, big-money mindset of Williams’s time – and it is just as profound a challenge to our tech-oriented world as well. Williams would no doubt say that all our smartphones and laptops and tablets and other devices signify precious little, when compared with the power of the creative human imagination.

[Chavelli Sulikowska · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding. Exquisite. Unique. Williams was a man of many talents; however, he is principally a philosopher I feel – a philosopher of words! His writing is subliminal and ultimately defies description – you just have to read it. It is a bit like free fall, disconcerting, like something you have never experienced, but so so liberating!

“It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits”

What beauty in these few simple words. For it is how he puts words together, and prior to that, how he carefully but effortlessly orders his thoughts before giving his pen free licence to interpret his sentiments almost by their own free will. Truly modern, his stream of consciousness style is not void of meaning – quite the contrary, however, meaning is latent and is esconsed, indeed, wrapped up in the language.

“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.”

Ultimately, this piece of prose-poetry combo is an ode to the power and perpetual importance of the imagination – as, according to Williams, “Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it 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…”

Spring and All was a highly refreshing read amongst some heavier novels. It was like a glass of chilled homemade lemonade on a hot and sticky summer afternoon. Just delightful.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spring And All

Published in Paris in 1923 in an edition of 300 copies, William Carlos Williams' "Spring at All" became a famous text of American literary modernism. The book was not reprinted in full until 1970, when New Directions Press published it together with four other books by Williams in a volume titled "Imaginations".Imaginations: Kora in Hell / Spring and All / The Descent of Winter / The Great American Novel / A Novelette & Other Prose (A New Directions paperbook) The editor of the "Imaginations" volume, Webster Schott, describes "Spring and All" as "a fooling-around book that became a crucial book."

Many years ago, I read "Spring and All" in the "Imaginations" volume. Then, I came upon this new (2011) New Directions issue of "Spring and All". The edition has a short introduction by C.D. Brown, a poet and Professor of English at Brown University. Beyond the introduction, the book reproduces the format of the book as originally published in Paris ninety years ago. I was hooked. Reading this facsimile volume, even holding it in my hands, itself made me imagine the freshness of Williams (1883 -- 1963) and his text of a long time ago. And imagination is the critical theme of "Spring and All."

"Spring and All" may still be a rarity in its entirety. But readers and students exposed to 20th Century American poetry cannot avoid Williams. Here is his most famous poem from the volume.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The book is short and paradoxical. It manages to be both punishingly difficult and obscure while filled as well with exuberance and a degree of simplicity. The book is a mixture of prose and poetry sections. The prose is set off in short paragraphs and in sections whose headings are deliberately befuddling. In the context of polemic and incomplete thoughts, Williams describes his concept of poetry and the need for freshness, newness, and imagination. Broadly, poetry needed a new language and approach away from metaphors, and representations. (In the much overused word of today, saying something was "like" something else rather than being what it is.) The poem, for Williams, does not represent. It is in itself as a work of imagination which allows the poet and the reader to see things in a new way.

Williams was writing against the backdrop of the Great War and the need to find something new after calamity. He also wrote in opposition to the pessimism and despair of T.S. Elliot's bleak portrayal of America in his 1922 poem, "The Waste Land." Williams spoke in the language of hope and rejuvenation and of love for the United States and its promise in a spirit owing a great deal to Whitman.

The book begins with an extended prose introduction before breaking into poetry with the words "THE WORLD IS NEW" followed by a poem that begins with the notorious phrase "By the road to the contagious hospital" that as it proceeds captures all that has been said before. (The poems are all untitled, although Williams would add titles to some later.) Poems and prose alternate for the rest of the volume as Williams discourses on American literature, Shakespeare, his own life, the difference between prose and poetry, why his poetry is unrhymed and unmetered, and why this makes no difference. To say the least, the writing is suggestive, but heady, disorganized, and difficult to follow.

The poems in their odd way elucidate the text. They are typically short, hard, with outrageous statements and obscure words and references. But they speak of barbershops, and cars, farmers and fishermen, baseball games, gypsies, -- and the famous wheelbarrow. In one poem, William announces paradoxically that "the rose is obsolete" and proceeds to explain how it isn't. In another poem, William asserts that "The pure products of America/go crazy --" In an evocative lesser known poem, Williams describes an eventful drive in his car which ends with an erotically charged sight: "I saw a girl with one leg/over the rail of a balcony." It is difficult not to be both puzzled and entranced by these poems.

Reading the poems in the way Williams initially intended, as part of the melange of "Spring and All" adds a dimension that is missing in reading the poems separately in an anthology. The book coheres and infuriates in a madcap fashion as the poetry and the prose reinforce one another. The volume gives a strong sense of the American modernist approach to poetry in a way the poems may not fully do standing alone.

Reading this facsimile volume, including poems I have read many times, brought the headiness of Williams to life in all its newness. Williams was less interested in criticizing his predecessors than in writing something alive and new for himself to avoid cliches and formalized emotions. His strictures should not in their turn be formalized. Each generation must find its own way and voice.

Robin Friedman

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it 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 therefor, since reality needs no personal support but exists free from human action, as proven by science in the instructability of matter and of force, it creates a new object, a play, a dance which is not a mirror up to nature but - As birds wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight".

[Theo Logos · Rating 5 out of 5]

To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force — the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.


Spring and All has become the unanticipated treasure of my 2025 reading year. Until recently, I had only been aware of William Carlos Williams from his most anthologized poems, chiefly Red Wheel Barrow:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

That’s nice. It’s a pretty photograph of a poem, but I had failed to see why it was so highly praised and widely anthologized. It was too smooth, like a rock wall with no hand holds to ascend.

It was Camille Paglia, who included Red Wheel Barrow and another Williams poem in her anthology of close readings, Break, Blow, Burn, that peaked my curiosity and sent me to this volume of William Carlos Williams to learn more. And WOW! did I ever find more than I expected!

Spring and All is far more than a collection of poems. It is a unique volume of mixed prose and poetry where a poem often seamlessly blends into prose that continues the same thought. In it, Williams proclaims his theory of language, creation, and the imagination. At one point he called his book “a manifesto of the imagination,” a tag that is completely appropriate. In it, Williams explains himself and his approach to writing poetry, his attempt to capture the ever receding Now Moment:

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested.

Williams further explains himself, showing what that looks like in practice:

Writing is not a searching about in the
daily experience for apt similes and pretty
thoughts and images. I have experienced
that to my sorrow. It is not a conscious re-
cording of the day’s experience “freshly and with the appearance of reality” —

The writer of imagination would find him-
self released from observing things for the
purpose of writing them down later. He
would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage
the free world, not a world which he carries
like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop
something or someone get more than he


With this imaginative manifesto, Williams also positioned himself as the anti T.S. Eliot. Williams wrote in his autobiography:
"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"
So while Eliot mummified poetry in layer upon layer of dusty, arcane symbolism, choking it off from the average reader, Williams attempted to strip away everything from a poem that separated it from that Eternal Now. Though both poets were shaped by the same post Great War world, Eliot wound his poems in the dead past, while Williams proclaimed the living Now.

And Williams’ poems, what of them? Poem after poem startled me, captured my imagination, and set me to pondering. Here is just a small sampling:

* * *

Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me

culling my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair —

It’s just
a moment
he said, we die
every night —

And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on

bald death —
I told him
of the quartz
lamp

and of old men
who said
at the door —
Sunshine today

for which
death shaves
him twice
a week


* * *


The farmer in deep thought
is pacing through the rain
among his blank fields, with
hands in pockets,
in his head
the harvest already planted.
A cold wind ruffles the water
among the browned weeds.
On all sides
the world rolls coldly away:
black orchards
darkened by the March clouds —
leaving room for thought.
Down past the brushwood
bristling by
the rainsluiced wagonroad
looms the artist figure of
the farmer — composing
— antagonist


* * *


The crowd at the ballgame
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal —

So I’m detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful


This book is too dense in its ideas, too whimsical in its composition and layout, too impressive in its presentation of prose and poetry wedded to convey a philosophy of literature, to read only once. I will absolutely revisit it and read it again to drain every last draught it has to offer. But for now, I’ll close this review by giving the author the last word:


Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it
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 there-
fore …it creates a new object, a play, a
dance which is not a mirror up to nature but
—

As birds’ wings beat the solid air without
which none could fly so words freed by the
imagination affirm reality by their flight

[Steve Morrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure how I made it into my mid-twenties without discovering William Carlos Williams. This is one of the most exciting books of poetry I've read in a while, and it really must be read as a volume. I never much cared for the brief snippets of Williams I had encountered in the past, but in context, strung out one after the other, the book is luminous and astonishing.

[Manuel Alberto Vieira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talvez devesse servir isto de manual de instruções à maior parte dos poetas contemporâneos.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read anything by WCW that wasn't in an anthology, and what a difference context makes. Spring and All is the answer to the question in the head of every high school English student: The red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater by the white chickens depends on what, exactly? The answer is 'poetry'; the publication date was 1923, and the book is a heated response to The Waste Land ("THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM," he writes) and the early work of WCW's pal Ezra Pound ("nothing / I have done... / is made up of / ... the diphthong / ae"). The poems are lodged between scraps of ranting prose, the whole thing constituting a manifesto for the radical rebuilding of poetic practice from the ground up. One of the surprises reading this for the first time gives is the discovery that the aims of the parochial New Jersey poet seem to have been closer to certain European avant-garde movements of the time than anything the cosmopolitan Pound or Eliot were up to. Hugh Kenner once remarked on how knowledge of etymology serves a reader of Williams exactly not at all, and it's easy to see why this is so, with WCW's determination to work in complete independence of the received literary tradition.

It's a fascinating book, but maybe not very cogent -- not to me, at least.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doctor Bill always appeared to have a knack for juxtaposition, a calculating eye which saw the created distance amongst the disparate. His lapse into idiom, the mongrel mud of native New Jersey, crackles in his trained hands. What I didn’t expect was the carnal darkness evident in many sections. Not just ribald but vaguely rapine. The lyrical passages reveal an urban disenchantment. Where one expects Whitman we find instead a Heidegger in greasy overalls -- to paraphrase Waugh riffing on noir.

His attempts at definition of first the Imagination and second Poetry aren’t meant for dialectic but rather further collage and omission. The glosses on patriotism and lumpen procreation appear as blistered blossoms—ones which will find explication, however, errant somewhere down the road. Pleading the case for imagination over realism, he drops the Bard’s mirror and casts his gaze upon a Red Wagon.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no empirical knowledge of the effect of drugs on human consciousness, yet when I finish reading an astounding work of poetry, I invariably wonder if this is what it feels like to be high on crack cocaine.

I revel in prose. I will most probably never be able to fully grasp the delicacy of novelists like George Eliot or Herman Melville.

Yet, there is an otherworldliness in poetry, the experience of which I can only compare to listening to Western classical music. It is something that can deprive one of sleep.

There is a nonaggressive firmness in Williams' poetry, an organic suture between various poles, so fine that it is barely perceptible. Williams gives life to artifice. All that is cold in his poetry is soothing, all that is warm never burns.

The realm of his imagination is even without being flat. I have never experienced anything quite like it before.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it 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 —As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight

[ocelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

the creative act by rick rubin if he were smart and a hater

[Konstantin R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

[rating = A-]
This manifesto of modernist poetry is a wonderful introduction to the thoughts of Mr. Williams. Some of his most famous poems are here "red wheelbarrow" and others. Though at times the poet goes a bit mad with his ideas, they, at most times, are clear. But really, this is more about the poetry. Sometimes Mr. Williams can be allusive and at others he is magnificent. I loved this collection and I will read it often, a pure wonder of the "Imagination". This is poetry as it should be, comprehensible and a combinations of sensory and metaphor, not pretentious rubbish that goes for Postmodern.

[Sheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

For most of my literary life, I have been a staunch hater of William Carlos Williams and his poetry, based exclusively on The Wheelbarrow and The Plums. These are the only poems of his I was ever exposed to, and they did so little to capture my interest and imagination that I was never moved to seek out more.
Instead, I kinda made WCW hating part of my personality---to the extent that I wrote a parody poem of The Wheelbarrow in college just for kicks. I have always delighted in any other parodies and satires I've come across. I just could not ever understand why these poems have been held up as shining examples of the form when they are just....artless.
Then my friend challenged me to read this little chapbook (as well as Camille Paglia's examinations of my most hated poems in Break Blow Burn) to see if my opinion might change. And it certainly has.
William Carlos Williams was deep, man. His theories of art and practice laid out here in challenging and yet playful ways are a revelation. And some of his other poetry is REALLY GOOD. There's some apocalyptic visionary stuff that reminded me of Blake. And a gentle poem about leaves that made me tear up at its beautiful simplicity.
I am left with a new appreciation of that Wheelbarrow upon which so much depends as a big fuck you to Eliot's arcane obfuscation. This alone is worth the price of admission.
I listened to an audiobook on this read through but I also purchased a kindle edition which I am looking forward to reading as well, to get a better sense of what he was doing with layout.
WCW, I apologize. (not going to stop laughing at Plums parodies though)

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is truly one of the quirkiest atypical and distinctive books of prose and poetry I have ever read. Reading it was like stepping into another dimension with the author explaining his feelings about the creative forces behind producing poetry his being "the form of poetry is related to the movements of the imagination revealed in words . . ." (67).

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme. To it all our works forever, from the remotest past to the farthest future, have been, are, and will be dedicated. To it alone we show our wit by having raised in its honor as monument not the least pebble. To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. This is something never before attempted. None to remain; nothing but the lower vertebrates, the mollusks, insects and plants. Then at last will the world be made anew. Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvellous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere. Order and peace abound" (5-6).

"The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ's name did he do it?--is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.

It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical" (54-55).

"It is rarely understood how such plays as Shakespeare's were written--or in fact how any work of value has been written, the practical bearing of which is that only as the work was produced, in that way alone can it be understood" (61).

"Time does not move. Only ignorance and stupidity move. Intelligence (force, power) stands still with time and forces change about itself--sifting the world for permanence, in the drift of nonentity" (69).

"And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge.

It is the imagination on which reality rides--It is the imagination--It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science--in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality -- Poetry" (77).

"Of course it may be said that if the difference is felt and is not discoverable to the eye and ear then what about it anyway. Or it may be argued, that since there is according to my proposal no discoverable difference between prose and verse that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing" (83).

"Imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it 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--

As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight" (91).

one day in Paradise
a Gipsy

smiled
to see the blandness

of the leaves —
so many

so lascivious

[Ryal Woods · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Spring and All twice through, back to back. Due to my travel boredom, yes, but also because it’s a crazy little book, and requires another go asap. It’s a treatise on intellect, creativity, and the boundaries (if there are any) between poetry and prose. While he argues that there are indeed delineations, the book itself argues that there aren’t. WCW writes in deliberately imperfect prose, assigning random chapter numbers and using large breaks between paragraphs so it would seem that each must stand on its own. He leaves off mid sentence, and makes you finish thoughts. He forces you to think, goddamnit. I could picture him cackling with glee as he pushed out another sentence spoken with logical and intellectual assuredness, complete with typos that may or may not have been intentional.

The poem that gets all the attention is XXII, known as The Red Wheelbarrow. But my favourite is XXI (illogically preceding in the right order) that goes,

one day in Paradise
a Gipsy

smiled
to see the blandness

of the leaves —
so many

so lascivious
and still

I don’t know what scholars have said about this poem or this book, perhaps it should be obvious that it doesn’t matter. He’s set up a playground that will make some readers giggle as they wind and dart through the words, that will cause fierce playground spitfights, knock a few readers on their asses because they didn’t see the swing coming back at them, and make some violently ill with the spin.

I was always a playground bystander, unwilling to jump into the fray, so I think the Gipsy is Williams, the Paradise is a false one, and the amusing blandness of the leaves – sheathes and sheathes of tomes of leaves – are overwrought attempts at Great Prose or Great Poetry. And still….

Still, every once in awhile, someone manages to knock out something unique, in spite of themselves.

[Arya]

‘It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science - in spite of everything’

uni reading I actually like yay!!

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Williams wrote the book Spring and All largely in response to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland with its multiple languages, literary/historical references, and variety of forms. But Williams counters with a bunch of Romantic platitudes and mystical sounding vagaries aimed at straw men of various shapes.

His theme appears to be a desire to have an imaginative relationship with the world. “To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force – the imagination.” (pg. 3)

Art should do more than “represent” or “be a mirror” to the world, he notes. Those who write in this manner are “TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGARISM.” (Capitalization in the original.) Their writing is a search of “daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images.” (pg. 49)

He explains: “What I put down as value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from ‘reality’ – such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words.” (pg. 22)

Good poetry is “a work of the imagination. It gives the feeling of completion by revealing the oneness of experience; it rouses rather than stupefies the intelligence by demonstration the importance of personality, by showing the individual, depresses before it, that his life is valuable – when completed by the imagination. And then only.” (pg. 30)

He also contrasts poetry to prose. Poetry is related to the “movement of the imagination revealed in words” and the “dynamization of emotion” while prose is about description and accuracy. (pg. 67)

Now my thoughts:

This appears to be an essay on what makes great poetry great. Granted, that is an impossible challenge that’s bound to twist one up in knots. Like pornography, we know it when we see it, but you could spend a lot of time in ill-lit booths trying to define it.

But Williams uses his idea of great poetry (my term) as a way to justify why his particular style of free verse is more “authentic” or “real” or “honest” than those writing in other formats – not only metrical poets but writers of prose. And that’s a step too far for me.

His argument is full of strawmen. I doubt, for example, if any serious poet would say that their poem is simply a representation or mirror of the world. (Yes, Hamlet says that, but he’s a fictional character.) Most poets of any age would say a poem is complex work in which the poet and the listener/reader interact.

Yes, there’s lots and lots of bad poetry out there. (As there are lots of bad hairdressers and hip hop bands and baristas.) Much of it is crappy, dishonest, unfelt, prescriptive, descriptive, boring, etc. Yes, most writing/poetry is not good. That doesn’t make mine or Williams’ any better.

Yet he associates his idea of an “imaginative” understanding of the world with his writing of non-metrical poetry. And in writing this non-metrical poetry he leaves the undefined others (metricists? plagiarists? traditionalist?) naked with nowhere to hide. (pg. 2) Their language is “demoded,” “empty” and meaningless (pg. 19-20). Isn’t that just the definition of bad poetry – metrical or not?

(And his focus on poetic meter is pretty naïve. Poetry is a rhythmic form and has existed in other forms and cultures without “metrics” such as stresses or syllables. There is Hebrew parallelism, for example, and Chinese forms that have a tonal rhythm. Repeated and recognizable rhythms, not meters, traditionally define poetry in all cultures/ages.)

His contrast between poetry and prose is equally unhelpful. (No doubt he brings this up because he heard people describe his poetry as prose broken into line.) A novelist can’t be moving? Dynamic? Imaginative? Achieve a oneness with experience? He should have let James Joyce know this. I’m sure Joyce would have appreciated this news.

A great work of writing rises above its meter (or non-meter). It rises above its “apt similes’ and “pretty thoughts”, and even its inherent dishonesty (art as artifice as artificial) to express something meaningful (whatever that means to people) that makes them want to read/hear it. And we can say that good writing is defined as that which more people want to read/hear. It’s really as simple as that.

If Williams wants to write in prosaic free verse, more power to him. He wasn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But neither is his work more authentic, true, meaningful, or imaginative because of this.

Overall, though, there’s a softness in his argument, full of vague words like imagination, emotion, authenticity, etc. But more than a cursory look at his ideas reveals a rather hollow mysticism to find that “oneness of experience.” What if you believe in the multitudinousness of experience? And in the end, he ends up saying very little of interest or substance.

As for the poems in this set: They are ok. Most are compilations of images with no particular point of view or direction, while the other more-famous poems are vignettes or simple descriptions of homely scenes usually larded with Romantic notions about nature and rebirth and mystical connections to reality. (Am I the only one to see the irony of this point of view coming from a Modernist?)

Most of the poems are unremarkable (in that I forgot them almost immediately after finishing them.) The poem now known as Spring and All (“By the road to the contagious hospital”) is by far the best (in spite of its Romantic platitudes). Red Wheelbarrow is the most well-known poem here.

If you like poetry about finding a mystical bond with the wholeness of nature wrapped around some vague ideas about poetry, you will like this collection. This doesn’t fall in my range of interest so I didn't find it moving.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anchoring, disorienting, affirming, questioning, validating; a connection and stark disconnect to understanding writing and imagination, mirroring and copying reality, beauty, meditation, the mode of writing and its purpose. The passion and the act of writing, tied to the driven need of the writer, and the expression of life and our surroundings; to put each object under a magnifying glass and expand what we see in part and as a whole. This book is essential, self-effacing, curious and technical; focusing on words and how chosen words represent emotion and imagination, evoke the human mind to see more than it might know otherwise; a glimpse into the mind of a great writer and his imaginative, creative examination of the act of writing and his own writing, and what makes writing necessary and worthy of exploration.

[Sophia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was one of the most inspiring pieces of imagination I have read. CWC writes in a manner that seems to rather float out of his head naturally. The mixture of poetry in verses and philosophy in free form glide through the pages and immediately translate into images, without passing through logical understanding. He managed to put concepts into words that I had yet failed to hold in my mind long enough to be able for them to be put in an order, he made me realise my absolute passion for poetry and art and helped me understand and recognise my own line of reasoning behind them.

[Mikael · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the one with the red wheelbarrow glazed with chicken shit

[Oskar]

Ega ma nüüd tegelikult liiga palju siit kaasa ei haaranud, see kõik läks mul palju rohkem üle pea kui ma oleksin oodanud. Aga mis siis ikkagi külge jäi?
Nt see et KEVADel on suur jõud
Või igasugune tore vormimäng, nt valesti nummerdatud ja pahupidi keeratud pealkirjad
ja ikka mõned kaunid luuleread, mis panevad korraks seisatama ja märkama.

Ma ei osanud absoluutselt oodata, et see pole nii väga traditsiooniline luulekogu. Siin on hoopis pooleks sellist tavalisemat luuletuse moodi napisõnalist ja leidlikult lihtsaid hetki tähele panevat luulet (mida ma ise Williamsilt oleksin oodanud), aga siis väga palju ka pikemaid (kultuurifilosoofilisi?) mõtisklusi proosavormis. Niimoodi ma polnud ka parimas positsioonis seda kõike vastu võtma. Lugesin kuidagi püüdes vabalt kaasa haarata mingeid impressioone, olustikke, hetki, mis luules tekivad. Aga filosoofiaosa niimoodi kergelt tunnetades üldse minuni ei jõudnud. Tegelikult oleks pidanud vist korralikult süvenema, aga süvenemist mul ei olnud. Kuigi kahtlustan, et ka kuitahes palju süvenedes, oleks see minust ikkagi üle pea lennanud. Põhiteema tundus olevat luule ja proosa erinevused, mis nende rollid on ja kustkohast need tulevad. Eks saabki siis kunagi uuesti lugeda.

Teadsin varem WCW kohta ainult et ta oli arst, kes kirjutas armsaid jääkapiluuletusi ja oodi Patersoni linnale ja ma absoluutselt ei osanud oodata sellist täiesti vaba plahvatust
Anna andeks, härra Williams, ma ei olnud tuttav sinu mänguga

[Nicholas Christenson · Rating 2 out of 5]

v different from what i expected , mostly negatively . it's perhaps more prose than poetry , and the whole thing seems to be meant to be taken as a sort of manifesto on the power/importance of imagination, the purpose of poetry, etc . of course in the first decades of the twentieth century this kind of manifesto was a dime a dozen , and this one really doesn't distinguish itself in any significant ways , it all seemed pretty obvious and simple to me, even if i suppose i "agreed" . no hate to the poems tho , for the most part . a lot of them r much more complex than the rly famous williams poems i was familiar with , and i think that serves all of the poetry well in a book-length context , tho for sure the most memorable stuff is quite simple (red wheelbarrow of course and i also quite liked "the veritable night / of wires and stars")

[Cassie Rauch]

gorgeous! i need to read more shakespeare.
i also finished noosha’s unpublished novel :)

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have been 5 stars if it was just the poems

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of my biggest inspirations, a simple guy who understood the world

[Fariha]

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates spaces

...

He who has kissed
a leaf
need look no further—

...

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens

...

to see the blandness
of the leaves—
so many
so lascivious
and still

...

In my life the furniture eats me
the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion—
they which alone know everything
and snitched on us in the morning—
...

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply fantastic