Joana's Post for Spring And All

Judging by Spring and All, William Carlos Williams clearly had an interesting view on life, or at least was very good at looking like he did. The line on page 176, "I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways--but he doesn't exist!" comes to mind. Throughout the whole sample that we were provided, he provides examples of eccentricity that perhaps isn’t expected of someone of that era. Another time would be on page 181, where he says “…EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING. Good God!” At times you think that perhaps he’s taking himself too seriously, but in quotes like that, the feeling that he’s trying to parody himself may come through.

This also is lent to by the fact that he contradicts himself through much of the text. One of Williams’ main points is that language very often fails to represent the world, a world that man didn’t create and couldn’t hope to understand fully. On page 185, the beginning of chapter one, Williams presents a scenario that basically comes down to the fact that he believes any person who tries to strictly adhere to language and convince others to do so is a “plagiarist.” However, especially in the sections that are clearly intended to be poems, he goes on his way at using the English language to represent these abstract thoughts in the language that he had previously said failed. By being so adamant against language, but using it for his own purposes, he is essentially being a hypocrite, or perhaps intentionally doing so to demonstrate how even though language fails to represent the world, language is often all we have. Williams uses it to represent not only the world, but also emotions and abstract thought that are even harder to explain, such as in his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Just by starting it with “so much depends,” it is often seen that the poem isn’t just about the red wheelbarrow, the chickens, or the water.

In the end, while Williams had some crazy notions in Spring And All, and some that might be considered “radical” even today, he seemed more than willing to admit that he falls into the same trappings as every other person in the writing profession, or anyone in the world, as we all speak the languages that he so thoroughly believed fell short.