William Carlos Williams. Spring and All.
William Carlos Williams’s answer to “The Waste Land”
Paris: Contact Publishing Co., 1923.
16mo.; colophon states printed at Dijon by Maurice Darantiere; publisher's gray-blue wrappers in protective mylar. In a custom slipcase with black morocco over marbled boards stamped in gilt.
First edition of 300 copies, the full edition; signed at publication by Williams on the front free endpaper.
Spring and All is a hybrid work consisting of alternating sections of prose and free verse. It might best be understood as a manifesto of the imagination. The prose passages are a dramatic, energetic and often cryptic series of statements about the ways in which language can be renewed in such a way that it does not describe the world but recreates it. These passages are interspersed with poems that demonstrate this recreation in both their form and content. The two most famous sections of Spring and All are the poems I, known by the title “Spring and All,” and XXII, perhaps Williams’s most famous poem, now anthologized as “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
According to Williams biographer James E. Breslin, T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, which appeared in 1922, was a major influence on Spring and All. In his Autobiography, Williams later wrote, “I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.” Spring and All viewed the same post–World War I landscape as Eliot but interpreted it differently. Williams “saw his poetic task was to affirm the self-reliant, sympathetic consciousness of Whitman in a broken industrialized world,” Williams critic Donald A. Stauffer noted. “But unlike Eliot, who responded negatively to the harsh realities of this world, Williams saw his task as breaking through restrictions and generating new growth.”
Spring and All was printed in an edition of 300 by Maurice Darantière. Darantière was based in Dijon, France, and had printed the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, as well as a range of other significant modernist works. Williams himself said the book drew little attention at the time of publication. Williams biographer Paul Mariani notes: “most of the copies that were sent to America were simply confiscated by American customs officials as foreign stuff and therefore probably salacious and destructive of American morals. In effect, Spring and All all but disappeared as a cohesive text until its republication nearly ten years after Williams’s death.” Some sources indicate that half of the original print run was confiscated by the U.S. Post Office. Until July 2011, when New Directions issued a facsimile edition, it was never again published as a free-standing book.