20 pages • 40 minutes read
Spring and All
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923)
Save for “Spring and All,” this haiku-like meditation is Williams’s most familiar poem. It was part of the same collection in which “Spring and All” appeared. The poem captures a snapshot moment, an image of white chickens gathered about a rain-dappled red wheelbarrow. As an exercise in pure Imagism, the short poem suggests more than it means and means more than it suggests.
“A Prayer in Spring” by Robert Frost (1915)
A contemporary of Williams, Frost takes a similar narrative premise as “Spring and All”: a sensitive poet grappling with the meaning of nature returning to life in the early spring after a cruel winter. Frost, however, eschews Williams’s enchantment over nature. The brooding Frost takes the return of spring into far darker implications than Williams argues. For Frost, the promise of spring tantalizes, but the speaker cannot find faith in the reanimation of the spring and, in the end, dismisses spring itself as a cruel mirage.
“A Light Exists in Spring” by Emily Dickinson (written most likely in 1864; published in 1896)
Williams was part of the first generation of practicing poets introduced to the radical verse of Dickinson through its posthumous publication—Dickinson died just three years after Williams was born. This poem captures the emotional ennui, depression, and moodiness that indicate winter has dragged on too long. Dickinson celebrates what Williams celebrates, the gradual reanimation of spring, which she finds in the sunlight that suffuses an early spring morning and its tonic effect on the spirit after too many months of winter.
Further Literary Resources
“The Symbol of Life Based on William Carlos Williams’ Poem ‘Spring and All’” by Jumino Jumino (2017)
As an example of contemporary exegesis of Williams’s poem, this article opens up the poem by using the rubric of transition. In presenting the threshold moment when winter gives way to spring, the poem, says Jumino, offers a strategy for mapping other emotional traumas. Whether the movement from grief to hope or love to betrayal or anxiety to faith, everyone’s life-narrative participates in the pattern Williams isolates. Transition is everything.
“William Carlos Williams’ ‘Spring and All’ and the Progress of Poetry” by J. Hillis Miller (1970)
Still a landmark analysis of Williams collection and still the starting point for any work with this poem, Miller’s article provides “Spring and All” with a context that uses the entire 1923 collection in which it appeared. The article defines Williams’s radical reinvention of poetic form as a consistent theme in the collection and finds “Spring and All” particularly telling as it can suggest symbolically Western civilization’s slow recovery from the catastrophe of World War I and, by extension, the bold stirrings of Modernism.
“Human History and the Natural World in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams and Yusef Komunyakaa” by Kristina Ten (2011)
As evidence of Williams’s continuing influence in the free verse poetry in contemporary America poetry, this article makes useful comparisons between “Spring and All” and the jazz-infused verse of Pulitzer Prize-winning Komunyakaa. According to Ten, in drawing on the liberating syncopations and disciplined metric experiments of Williams, Komunyakaa applies the thematic premise of liberation from authority to the century-long quest for civil rights among American minorities.
Listen to Poem
A reading of the poem by Williams himself is available on YouTube. Recorded in 1945, it offers for visual a black and white photo of Passaic General Hospital. The recitation comes off a bit nasally and rushed, Williams not indulging the opportunities for rich pauses and elegant crescendos within his own careful sonic weave. By contrast, in the recording made by poet-critic Robert Pinsky for the PBS Newshour, Pinsky lingers at the right places, rushes when appropriate, and all the while relishes the long vowels and all those gorgeous s’s. He swings into an upbeat at the break at Stanza 5 to match Williams’s own acceleration into animation. He lingers with dramatic effect on the phrase “One by one.” Pinsky also provides a brief but helpful introduction to Williams and to the poem.
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By William Carlos Williams
