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Imaginations
Imaginations makes accessible to the broad reading public live early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for Kora in Hell , have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms. Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.”
The prose-poem improvisations ( Kora in Hell ) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages ( Spring and All and The Descent of Winter ) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing ( A Novelette ) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
The prose-poem improvisations ( Kora in Hell ) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages ( Spring and All and The Descent of Winter ) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing ( A Novelette ) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
366 pages, Paperback
First published January 17, 1971
33 people are currently reading
777 people want to read
About the author
William Carlos Williams
413 books827 followersWilliam 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
intermittently-reading
November 16, 2012This is fucking brilliant. Aswim in übertalented hustling. Unique, metaphysically ball-squeezing, mind-crimping, thought-sparking, bubble-popping, Highliner-captaining, lip-tugging, mirror-polishing, heavens-driving, knuckle-cracking, paint-thinning, vacuum-cleaning, stasis-spiking, beanie-spinning, marble-pooping, Thomas-pinching, perm-straightening, pupil-dilating; a melange of poetic prose, prose poetry, something I'll perhaps never finish but ever return to.
April 18, 2008
The thing I like most about this book is how subtly amateurish it feels - as if Williams really is just messing around in the margins of a larger, more "serious" project. Actually, all of Williams's writing is like that for me: beautifully, expansively marginal. So marginally marginal that suddenly we realize that we've been mistaking the center. Debunking, and then rebunking: "Look! The REAL important stuff is happening over here." This could be the first line of all great American poetry.
The architectural innovations of Spring and All are broad, almost clumsy, but end up working, if only because Williams's sentences are tight and his thought, well, equally tight (this being I guess one of the revolutions hidden in this book: Williams talks over and over again about emancipating the imagination, but it's this exact freedom that lets his writing be, not airy and vague, but specific, sharp, tangy). Like Ulysses or Anna Karenina, a book that still feels, not only new, but newer, at least than most of the stuff I've been reading lately.
Williams, like Bruce Springsteen, is an album artist. These books work as books even better than their singles.
The architectural innovations of Spring and All are broad, almost clumsy, but end up working, if only because Williams's sentences are tight and his thought, well, equally tight (this being I guess one of the revolutions hidden in this book: Williams talks over and over again about emancipating the imagination, but it's this exact freedom that lets his writing be, not airy and vague, but specific, sharp, tangy). Like Ulysses or Anna Karenina, a book that still feels, not only new, but newer, at least than most of the stuff I've been reading lately.
Williams, like Bruce Springsteen, is an album artist. These books work as books even better than their singles.
December 7, 2015
This is one of the Ur-texts of my aesthetic development. I keep reading it over and over.
August 7, 2009
I will always be 'currently-reading' this book. It's just one of those books you read forever.
March 20, 2022
Random absurdity, with occasional moments of clarity. Is this some sourcebook for the absurd? And no discernible method to the madness.
March 25, 2011
Here is a book I read many over the years. And when I am teaching a
poetry class for children or adults I use it as a nice
reference book to what Williams accomplished as a modern "American" poet.
Spring and All is my favorite section. Imaginations! Hmm. Great and
so simple but great poems by a true American English speaking poet
from Rutherford, New Jersey. I glad he stayed in Rutherford he mined
the language of Polish, Italian and Jewish immigrant voices of
Paterson's silk mills and factories. which are now warehouses.
poetry class for children or adults I use it as a nice
reference book to what Williams accomplished as a modern "American" poet.
Spring and All is my favorite section. Imaginations! Hmm. Great and
so simple but great poems by a true American English speaking poet
from Rutherford, New Jersey. I glad he stayed in Rutherford he mined
the language of Polish, Italian and Jewish immigrant voices of
Paterson's silk mills and factories. which are now warehouses.
February 13, 2008
The long poem "Spring and All" was staple reading this past fall, in that it was a text that was a part of my seminar with professor Ruth Jenison at UMass Amherst.
July 17, 2014
Absolutely brilliant and entirely unique. I have never encountered, throughout my reading career, anyone who writes like WCW. Joyce once said that when he read Vico he felt like his mind was expanding - that's exactly how I felt while reading this.
Like his contemporary and close penpal, good ol' Ezra Pound, there is a wonderful emphasis in this book in which Williams tells us the importance of 'making something new' and not just relying on old forms or formulas.
Williams believes that art, including literary forms of art, should transcend science and philosophy to occupy their own special place in the world but unfortunately a lot of our current or existing models are largely based on science or philosophical assumptions, which Williams points out is WRONG. He does not mean that science and philosophy are wrong as academic pursuits, far from it, but that art (including literature and music) should not be subjected to the same rigors and exigencies of these more precise areas of knowledge. And I totally agree with him.
Imaginations is a collection of early distillations and transcriptions of a great mind at work - a mind which has been untied from the docks of complacency, tradition and expectation among other things and this book is a literary graph so to speak, to loosely paraphrase Robert Creeley, of the mind's wanderings. It is a mixture of prose and poetry, wonderfully women in and out and back and forth with a spellbinding effect. I loved how Williams added in spurts of advertising jingles and slogans and even some medical reports or cases that he was involved in at the time with his practice. To read this book is to read a great mind trying to cope both physically and mentally with the exigencies of juggling a job (medicine) and a true vocation (writing). I also feel, as other reviewers have rightly pointed out, that this is a book I will CONSTANTLY be learning and re-learning from so it ranks high up there on my to-read-again list.
Williams is without a doubt one of the most important minds of the 20th Century, as important as Joyce, Stein, Elliot or Pound.
I have also seen much of his legacy in other writers - in Kerouac for example but especially in the works of Philip Whalen. If you read any of of Whalen's loose, spontaneous work (especially his non-Buddhist works), you will see a rather strong resemblance in styles and the sharp, jarring change of topic which is sometimes an intentional juxtaposition and sometimes just an instance of the graph of the mind jumping and the writing captures that jump beautifully. Lew Welch's 'A Round of English' also seems to have been at least partly based and/or influenced by literary models found in Williams.
This book is BEAUTIFUL but before you read it, a word of advice - leave all your assumptions about writing and what writing should be and should try to achieve at the door. NO BOOK has taught me more about the act of writing itself than this book. Truly marvelous.
Like his contemporary and close penpal, good ol' Ezra Pound, there is a wonderful emphasis in this book in which Williams tells us the importance of 'making something new' and not just relying on old forms or formulas.
Williams believes that art, including literary forms of art, should transcend science and philosophy to occupy their own special place in the world but unfortunately a lot of our current or existing models are largely based on science or philosophical assumptions, which Williams points out is WRONG. He does not mean that science and philosophy are wrong as academic pursuits, far from it, but that art (including literature and music) should not be subjected to the same rigors and exigencies of these more precise areas of knowledge. And I totally agree with him.
Imaginations is a collection of early distillations and transcriptions of a great mind at work - a mind which has been untied from the docks of complacency, tradition and expectation among other things and this book is a literary graph so to speak, to loosely paraphrase Robert Creeley, of the mind's wanderings. It is a mixture of prose and poetry, wonderfully women in and out and back and forth with a spellbinding effect. I loved how Williams added in spurts of advertising jingles and slogans and even some medical reports or cases that he was involved in at the time with his practice. To read this book is to read a great mind trying to cope both physically and mentally with the exigencies of juggling a job (medicine) and a true vocation (writing). I also feel, as other reviewers have rightly pointed out, that this is a book I will CONSTANTLY be learning and re-learning from so it ranks high up there on my to-read-again list.
Williams is without a doubt one of the most important minds of the 20th Century, as important as Joyce, Stein, Elliot or Pound.
I have also seen much of his legacy in other writers - in Kerouac for example but especially in the works of Philip Whalen. If you read any of of Whalen's loose, spontaneous work (especially his non-Buddhist works), you will see a rather strong resemblance in styles and the sharp, jarring change of topic which is sometimes an intentional juxtaposition and sometimes just an instance of the graph of the mind jumping and the writing captures that jump beautifully. Lew Welch's 'A Round of English' also seems to have been at least partly based and/or influenced by literary models found in Williams.
This book is BEAUTIFUL but before you read it, a word of advice - leave all your assumptions about writing and what writing should be and should try to achieve at the door. NO BOOK has taught me more about the act of writing itself than this book. Truly marvelous.
December 9, 2007
"The writer of the 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 enjoy the free world, not a world he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he..."
Highlights: Spring and All, Kora In Hell: Improvisations
Highlights: Spring and All, Kora In Hell: Improvisations
March 25, 2025
One can easily underestimate WCW as a writer due to the directness (brutality?) of his poetry, but reading his prose--even in this highly experimental collection--leaves little doubt as to his gargantuan abilities, as well as his gargantuan appetites. That inelegant sentence is a travesty when applied to a book like this.
September 12, 2013
This is a much needed break from what I have been reading for a long time, and on a purely subjective level I would rate it highly just for that. However, this book is fantastic and so it will garner nothing but the most realistic four star review. With a compilation like this, the audience who might have contrary opinion is mostly never going to read it, and the rest will rate it very well because it's the sort of thing they enjoy. I find this book is near perfect because it is nuanced, chaotic, opinionated, deep, and sometimes even nearly joyful. The poetry is evocative, the prose is fine, everything lying between the two is never uninspired.
"The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piees from one end to the other."
I mean, it was the 1920s (already cool) in America (the place to be then**) written by a very skilled doctor-poet (h*ck yeah), well-connected litterateur (the jealousy slays me), who had a zealous view of the art of writing (always good). Even holding all of the above to be true, the pieces themselves come off so naturally that it is made to look easy, as if W.C.W sat down exhausted after every long day or strange night and immediately penned a gem or two before even taking a sip of whatever cool prohibition-era drink he was sipping. These are early pieces, some of which debuted in Paris in small numbers (again, very very jealous) thanks mostly to Ezra Pound (one imagines). This early output brims with vitality, it is generally raw, and has an intriguing depth of scope that makes even the more rough material lively and interesting.
"Being thus roused the man does not seek to outdo his rival but grows heavily sad and thinks of death and his lost pleasures thus showing himself to be a person of discernment. For by so doing he gives evidence of a bastard sort of knowledge of that diversity of context in things and situations which the great masters of antiquity looked to for the inspiration and distinction of their compositions."
Themes include reflections about America (which are often unerringly accurate and knowing), musings upon the nature of the imagination, of poetry, of writing, of many historical American figures, interludes from everyday life, there is stream-of-consciousness experimentation and so much more. It's truly inspiring to read the work of someone who so obviously and deeply cares, by someone who actually holds poetry in esteem, and then for it to not be tiresome, hackneyed, and the other thing is truly what is most valuable in this book. In form and content I found it inspiring and even reassuring, when it wasn't outright impressing me. Yeah I'm gushing a bit, but it is hard not to. It is simply hard to find anything objectionable, boring, trivial, or stupid among the works in this book. I didn't just forget what I disliked – there was nothing I disliked. For the first time in months I found myself taking notes, as well as reflective forays into thought.
"The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fullsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar."
Lots of highlights for me, but I really dug The Descent of Winter, and for myself found the prose mostly the strongest and best stuff. I could quote this book at length but will restrain myself. I always enjoy this book and reading it straight through was a good call – I will gladly do so again. Seriously worth reading. If you can't stomach this, I don't know what to tell you, but: you're probably a super alienated outsider, lost cause, jagged square, or philistine – and good luck to you if you're studying English lit: get your criticism out there because it must be fascinating. Could be I'm enshrining the established classic, as fools and idiots sometimes do.
"The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piees from one end to the other."
I mean, it was the 1920s (already cool) in America (the place to be then**) written by a very skilled doctor-poet (h*ck yeah), well-connected litterateur (the jealousy slays me), who had a zealous view of the art of writing (always good). Even holding all of the above to be true, the pieces themselves come off so naturally that it is made to look easy, as if W.C.W sat down exhausted after every long day or strange night and immediately penned a gem or two before even taking a sip of whatever cool prohibition-era drink he was sipping. These are early pieces, some of which debuted in Paris in small numbers (again, very very jealous) thanks mostly to Ezra Pound (one imagines). This early output brims with vitality, it is generally raw, and has an intriguing depth of scope that makes even the more rough material lively and interesting.
"Being thus roused the man does not seek to outdo his rival but grows heavily sad and thinks of death and his lost pleasures thus showing himself to be a person of discernment. For by so doing he gives evidence of a bastard sort of knowledge of that diversity of context in things and situations which the great masters of antiquity looked to for the inspiration and distinction of their compositions."
Themes include reflections about America (which are often unerringly accurate and knowing), musings upon the nature of the imagination, of poetry, of writing, of many historical American figures, interludes from everyday life, there is stream-of-consciousness experimentation and so much more. It's truly inspiring to read the work of someone who so obviously and deeply cares, by someone who actually holds poetry in esteem, and then for it to not be tiresome, hackneyed, and the other thing is truly what is most valuable in this book. In form and content I found it inspiring and even reassuring, when it wasn't outright impressing me. Yeah I'm gushing a bit, but it is hard not to. It is simply hard to find anything objectionable, boring, trivial, or stupid among the works in this book. I didn't just forget what I disliked – there was nothing I disliked. For the first time in months I found myself taking notes, as well as reflective forays into thought.
"The difficulty of modern styles is made by the fragmentary stupidity of modern life, its lacunae of sense, loops, perversions of instinct, blankets, amputations, fullsomeness of instruction and multiplications of inanity. To avoid this, accuracy is driven to a hard road. To be plain is to be subverted since every term must be forged new, every word is tricked out of meaning, hanging with as many cheap traps as an altar."
Lots of highlights for me, but I really dug The Descent of Winter, and for myself found the prose mostly the strongest and best stuff. I could quote this book at length but will restrain myself. I always enjoy this book and reading it straight through was a good call – I will gladly do so again. Seriously worth reading. If you can't stomach this, I don't know what to tell you, but: you're probably a super alienated outsider, lost cause, jagged square, or philistine – and good luck to you if you're studying English lit: get your criticism out there because it must be fascinating. Could be I'm enshrining the established classic, as fools and idiots sometimes do.
September 6, 2018
A truly glorious little book. Little only in its page count, is expansive in its instructive abilities, able to remind readers of all disciplines that if you sit down each day and write a couple pages, at the end of the year, you have a book. But that book at the end of the year - of course - is shaped so very much by the inimitable mind of WCW. I recommend this book for working writers and students of writing, but not for generalist readers.
March 12, 2008
What a difference to read WCW in context. Before I had only encountered him in anthologies. It was quite an eye-opener to read his short poems interspersed with his segments of explantory or almost polemical prose.
February 22, 2010
I did enjoy reading this, but unfortunately, reading a majority of his prose was like reading James Joyce for the first time. I grew to love Joyce the more I read him. So, this book will warrant a reread in the future to get the full enjoyment of it.
February 8, 2021
A book to read, have on your bookshelf, and return to again and again. Whenever wherever you read of its pages you will find new treasures to ponder.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 4, 2009
A pediatrician and a poet...what a winning combination...insightful and appropriate.
August 4, 2023
Versos reunidos de cuatro libros distintos que bien podrían ser cauces turbulentos que fluyen hacia un destino: la libertad de la imaginación. Carlos Williams escribió sin miedo a tropezarse, como quien va aprendiendo a bailar mientras pisa talones ajenos.
Su poesía es vestigio de una exploración admirable y vertiginosa solamente posible en la juventud de un poeta.
Su poesía es vestigio de una exploración admirable y vertiginosa solamente posible en la juventud de un poeta.
January 21, 2021
Recensione nel video WRAP UP del primo febbraio sul mio canale YouTube 😇
February 23, 2021
Full of WCW's style, wit, longing, genius and probing. Read it. Savour it. Delight in it. Puzzle over it. Read it some more!
March 8, 2021
imaginations with the beautiful wcw, what else need be said... x
August 9, 2016
(308) "If one come with Miss (Marianne) Moore's work to some wary friend and say, "Everything is worthless but the best and this is the best," adding, "only with difficulty discerned" will he see anything, if he be at all well read, but destruction? From my experience he will be shocked and bewildered. He will perceive absolutely nothing except that his whole preconceived scheme of values has been ruined. And this is exactly what he should see, a break through all preconception of poetic form and mood and pace, a flaw, a crack in the bowl. It is this that one means when he says destruction and creation are simultaneous. But this is not easy to accept. Miss Moore, using the same material as all others before her, comes at it so effectively at a new angle as to throw out of fashion the classical conventional poetry to which one is used and puts her own and that about her in its place. The old stops are discarded. This must antagonize many. Furthermore, there is a multiplication, a quickening, a burrowing through, a blasting aside, a dynamization, a flight over - it is modern, but the critic must show that this is only to reveal an essential poetry through the mass, as always, and with superlative effect in this case."
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February 14, 2017- "Spring and All" - an incomparable work of genius and enthusiasm. 5/5
- "Kora in Hell" - the preface is a masterpiece, the rest is barely ungraspable. 3,5/5
- For the others, to be continued...
- "Kora in Hell" - the preface is a masterpiece, the rest is barely ungraspable. 3,5/5
- For the others, to be continued...
December 4, 2012
Reading especially Spring And All, one witnesses the break from the past, in poetry, in thinking, in perception, in spirituality. The barnacles of mush fall away - the world, the earth is re-discovered. Williams finds the center, experiences the center of consciousness.
...the imagination is an actual force
comparable to electricity or steam...the work
of imagination is not “like” anything but
transfused with the same forces which transfuse
the earth...it possesses the quality of independent
existence, of reality which we feel in ourselves.
Spring and All
...the imagination is an actual force
comparable to electricity or steam...the work
of imagination is not “like” anything but
transfused with the same forces which transfuse
the earth...it possesses the quality of independent
existence, of reality which we feel in ourselves.
Spring and All
August 16, 2023
Imaginations is a 1970 collection of five previously published early works by William Carlos Williams, comprising Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Descent of Winter, The Great American Novel, and A Novelette & Other Prose.
January 18, 2011
wow wow wow
January 19, 2008
Derivative and generally leaden poetry that apes his contemporaries Eliot and Pound, WC Williams is like the Splenda of modern poetry.
March 23, 2008
still slogging through (off&on) these tasty early works.
"Electricity has been discovered forever."
"Electricity has been discovered forever."
started-but-not-finished
March 26, 2010Another book that I have to set aside for now. We only read "The Great American Novel" for class, and I don't have time to read the rest. But one day....
August 1, 2012
Mostly nonsense. Had no business being published.
April 11, 2016
Glad he isn't my doctor. Feel sorry for his family can't Imagine, no pun intended being a family member of this man. His notes on James Joyce were interesting.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews