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William Carlos WilliamsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The world will not accept the logic of its own ending. That is the lesson of nature when it transitions into spring, and Williams taps that energy. In his more than 15 years exploring the unsuspected power of everyday things igniting epiphanies, the images Williams retrieved from the world to shape the substance of his verse—wheelbarrows, fire engines, plums, wildflowers, mailboxes, old shoes—never require context. The argument of Williams’s poetry is always that the random collision of shapes, colors, textures, light, and shadow is its own context, sufficient unto itself.
That said, the image here of a late winter wasteland world edging at last into the promise of spring has resonance with the wasteland left behind by the catastrophe of World War I. As with most of the intelligentsia of his generation, Williams spent time Europe in the first years after the war with other expatriates and saw firsthand the impact of the brutalities of the war, a five-year conflict that killed more than 20 million Europeans and left much of central Europe in rubble, a geopolitical war that had in the end changed little of Europe’s geopolitical boundaries.
In 1923, just six years after the war grinded to a halt, when Williams first drafted this celebration of early spring, the metaphor of the recovery could be applied to Europe itself just beginning to emerge from the wasteland-ambience of the war. Thus, spring can be a metaphor for Williams’s generation of expatriate intelligentsia—painters, poets, writers, sculptors, composers, photographers—who called themselves the Lost Generation and whose raw artistic energies were driving a revolution they quite self-consciously dubbed Modernism. Within this historic context, “Spring and All” can be seen as a corrective to the malaise, moral emptiness, and spiritual discontent expressed by T. S. Eliot in “The Waste Land,” published just the year before.
Williams’s spring poem, at once austere and celebratory, brings together two apparently incongruous literary traditions of his time, free verse and Imagism.
Williams grew up delighting in reciting the open verse of fellow New Jerseyite Walt Whitman, whose grave just 45 minutes from Rutherford had fast become, in the years after Whitman’s death in 1892, a pilgrimage site for young poets. From Whitman, Williams learned that in rejecting rhythm and rhyme as tedious and predictable the apparent carelessness of so-called free verse, dismissed by more polite poets as a yawp, actually required a careful and measured ear. Williams was tuned to the aural music generated by Whitman’s intricate interplay of vowels and consonants. In addition, Whitman showed Williams the exuberance possible in liberating lines of poetry to find their way, much as lines of music, to their own time, their own tempo. And as reflected in “Spring and All,” Whitman understood that if poetry is designed to happen in the ear then nothing is more sublime than the subtle choreography of a pause.
Williams as well tapped into Imagism’s austerity. Imagism is the early-20th-century movement that was inspired by innovations in photography and provided its more provocative philosophical apologia by Williams’s college buddy Ezra Pound. Imagism celebrated the direct presentation of things in concise lines, free of the ornate verbiage that had defined much British and American poetry at the turn of the century. In “Spring and All,” for instance, the speaker is driving his car to work. In this, the poem reflects what the speaker sees, the lingering effects of winter on a middy New Jersey field, cleanly, directly. Williams himself famously argued, “No ideas but in things.”
“Spring and All” brings together both literary traditions. There is the poet’s unabashed embrace of the extraordinarily ordinary late winter world of his daily commute, rendered in carefully sculpted minimalist lines that reward, really demand recitation.
By William Carlos Williams