Spring and All (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Carlos Williams
- First Published: 1923
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Diseases, Life, biological, Hospitals, Spring
“Spring and All” is a poem of only twenty-seven lines, yet it echoes some of the imagery as well as the concepts of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and is filled with Williams's desire to break with poetic tradition. The poem reveals this in the second and third words of the title. Spring is one of the most traditional themes of poetry; “and All” deflates it.
The poem corrects poetic notions of spring—those one finds, for example, in Geoffrey Chaucer's famous opening of The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), in which he describes the “sweet” season of...
[The entire page is 548 words long]
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