Spring and all
Overview: Spring and All is a manifesto of the imagination - a hybrid of alternating sections of prose and free verse that coalesce in dramatic, energetic, and beautifully cryptic statements of how language re-creates the world. Spring and All contains some of Williams's best-known poetry, including Section I, which opens, "By the road to the contagious hospital," and Section XXII, where Williams penned his most famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow." Now, almost 90 years since its first publication, New Directions publishes this facsimile of the original 1923 Contact Press edition, featuring a new introduction by C.D. Wright.
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What Hacker News says
- Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse.
Being and Event by Alain Badiou (translated by Oliver Feltham).
After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux (translated by Ray Brassier).
Spring and All by William Carlos Williams.
- Currently reading: The House of Life, Mario Praz; Spring and All (try to read it every spring)
Recently finished: 1089 and All That (finished today), The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Gibson's The Peripheral
- Honestly, I think the reason it gets included so often is that it is short and can usually fill out a page that one of Williams' longer and more substantive poems (e.g., Spring and All) ends on.
Also, it is one of the better examples of a type of visual/minimalist/free verse mid-20th century american poetry that is super approachable and understandable (read some of the Wallace Stevens stuff for the counter examples).
Plus, it is great for having "Wait, is this really a poem? What is a poem??" discussions in English 101 classes.
And, to be fair, if some random person wrote it, it would get almost no attention at all, but Williams really was a quite good poet. And while this little poem doesn't have much to it, what it has is nicely wrought.
Just my $0.02...
- I don't agree with civilian's post, but I think that he is onto something. Once you get past Noah Webster and Benjamin Spock, the shaping effect is hard for me to see.
The Education of Henry Adams includes some interesting chapters, though it is not nearly Adams's best work: yet what in America has it shaped other than the occasional class reading list? Similarly there are fine and complex works of literature that few have read. Take a poll at the bus stop or the coffee shop and see how many people can quote you five lines out of North of Boston, Spring and All or Howl. (I can do maybe one from Howl and almost certainly the number in it is wrong" "America, when will you become worthy of your two million Trotskyites?") Moby Disk is a fine novel, but how many have read it through; no doubt The Sound and the Fury is also, but it defeated me at an age when I read a lot of Faulkner, and I haven't been back.
