Williams, Spring and All

William Carlos Williams’ fiction, as well as his more simple and minimalist poetry (such as one of my favorites, his imagist poem “This is Just to Say”) is a collection that is on one side, while the more experimental work found in Spring and All are on the other. While we can find some of the individual poems in other sources, such as the title poem and the “Red Wheelbarrow”, it’s an experience to read the collection in sequence, and in doing so I have a new appreciation and understanding of Williams’ writing, both his poetry and prose. The way he has incorporated real speech into his poems—his line breaks in rhythm where we tend to pause, and his subjects revolving around everyday life (jazz, work, eating plums for breakfast) is refreshing, and yet so familiar. On the other hand, Williams’ immanent style doesn’t become American speech, but grabs the English language and lays it out for the reader to examine in a world that Williams has us imagine: “where bridge stanchions / rest / certainly / piercing / left ventricles / with long / sunburnt fingers” (XIII, 210, 34-40). The image of the bridge having long sunburnt fingers is one thing, and understanding the combinations of these words together is another; while some of these images may be familiar in our experience, they are doing something quite of their own with one another on the page. In Williams’ prose poetry in Spring and All, it’s interesting how he ends his sentences and paragraphs just as he moves from thought to thought in his mind; Willaims says of the imagination, “It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization” (225). This feeding of the imagination is on an individual level, just as Williams feeds the individual reader his immanent poetry, requiring the reader to imagine and consider what the art is doing on the page. Williams says, “poetry liberates the words from their emotional implications, prose confirms them in it” (231). In Williams’ prose, his rejection of former traditions speaks to the reader in his examples of how “art” is constricting and dangerous; “Her feet are bare and not too delicate” (185), art is not divided into strict traditional symbols and categories; “it may be argued, that since there is according to my proposal no discoverable difference between prose and verse that in all probability none exists and that both are phases of the same thing” (230). Indeed, after getting used to the switching from free verse to prose, which was surprising the first few times, the reader soon doesn’t notice any awkward switch; both forms blend into one another, even when thoughts are finished and new ones begin. Williams very successfully argues this in the way he has presented Spring and All, I think, and one can throw out having his fiction “on one side” and his “bridge with long sunburnt fingers” on “the other side.” Although, I must say I agree with what I believe Richard said in class—where our packet cut off so precisely at XXV: “Somebody dies every four minutes / in New York State— / To hell with you and your poetry—” (231) I wrote a giant question mark above it when I had finished reading…but in all honesty, I agree, it is Williams in his absolute brilliance.