Poetry
Spring and All
William Carlos Williams · 1923
Synopsis
The book alternates passages of prose with twenty-seven untitled poems, numbered in Roman numerals. The prose imagines that the imagination, intoxicated, destroys the world and humanity, and that the world then begins again, new; its chapter numbers run out of order, and one is printed upside down. The poems open on a road to the contagious hospital at the end of winter; further on pass a young servant girl raised by the State and placed at fifteen with a family, then a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain beside white chickens, of which it is said that so much depends upon it.
Context
The book was printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantière, the printer of Ulysses, for Contact, Robert McAlmon's publishing house, and issued in 1923 in about three hundred copies. American customs confiscated most of them, taking the volume for foreign merchandise that was probably licentious: almost no one read it. The poems were later taken out one by one for anthologies, which gave them titles. The book is dedicated to the painter Charles Demuth and cites, among others, Juan Gris.
Who it is for
A short and bewildering book, in which theoretical pages alternate with the poems. Translated into French by Valérie Rouzeau.
Prizes and reception
Almost unnoticed when it appeared, the book was not reprinted in full until 1970; New Directions published a facsimile in 2011.
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