Spring and All

This edition of Spring and All reproduces
the original 1923 edition,
published by Contact Press,
with a new introduction by C. D. Wright
.

Spring and All

by

William Carlos Williams

Introduction by C. D. Wright

A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

The Great War is barely in the background. The fatal flu pandemic fills the void, concentrating on the young and healthy. This weird little book is brought into the world the same month as the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first major drive to seize control. Among artists and writers, the urge for renewal is gaining ground in the aftermath of monstrous destruction, in the bud of worse to come. It is boggling that so much hearty artistic innovation has commenced to proliferate and thrive. Do or die. Those who can, do. Even the wreckage of Europe is tempting to the young, creative, contrary, and restless. One American writer stays put, finishes school, starts a medical practice. One American writer sticks around to catch the babies.

* * *

1923: Wallace Stevens’s
Harmonium
was published, Mina Loy’s
Lunar Baedecker
, Jean Toomer’s unassimilable hybrid masterwork, 
Cane
, and
Spring and All
, an equally unassimilable hybrid masterwork. That year, Yeats, whose dominance in poetry was commonly acknowledged, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Marianne Moore’s
Observations
and Gertrude Stein’s
The Making of Americans
were soon to clear the horizon. The former would be as steady on its feet as a wading bird; the latter, a bollard of granite. The leonine-haired Ezra Pound was the force upon which many depended and with which all had to contend. Staying on his own side of the Atlantic tendered William Carlos Williams the breathing room he needed.

Spring and All
was printed in Dijon, by the same Darantiere who had printed
Ulysses
the year before; so the printer, at least, was already familiar with the oddities the English language could bear. Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based Contact Publishing Company issued Williams’s manifesto-of-sorts in an edition of three hundred, most of which went undistributed. The year before, 1922, was high tide in poetry:
The Duino Elegies, Trilce
, and
The Waste Land
. The latter was a head blow to William Carlos Williams. He had more or less absorbed the concussion of “Prufrock” and sounded off on it in his prologue to
Kora in Hell
. He had already recalibrated and redoubled to the task of staking out the new word for the not-so-new-anymore world. Then came
The Waste Land
, all tricked out with Sanscrit and Latin ornaments. The impact was as useful as it was painful. Whap. Now he knew what he was opposing; now he could move in the direction he wanted to go-forward-in his “small or large machine made of words.” For Williams, poetry was meant to be in motion. He willed himself ready: “How easy to slip/into the old mode, how hard to/cling firmly to the advance-”

Williams epitomized the prepared observer. A watcher, a listener. Goat stubborn. Feet-in-the-soil independent. He could write whatever, whenever, and as he damn well pleased. William Carlos Williams was the embodiment of the values Americans touted but seemed capable of expressing only in “isolate flecks.” With an English father and Puerto Rican mother, there was no compelling incentive to become an expat. He would embrace the contrary impulse. Like his fellow New Jerseyan, Whitman, his apostrophe was to the future, but he hankered for contact here and now. The charge of this writing was change. His own personal epic and constantly shifting landscape was just on the other side of the parlor window, the whole procession. Like Whitman, he would gradually come to a great human understanding, an apprehension that eluded a number of his peers.

Between great hails to the imagination and salvos of opprobrium, William Carlos Williams set one sharp-edged poem after another into the composition of an unframed original. So the one who did not cast off his roots chose the oldest trope in the book, SPRING, to push and pull American poetry into the present tense. Not before he had initiated a willful number of false starts, cranking up anticipation and repeatedly sabotaging expectations. Not before the hectored reader was fetched up “by the road to the contagious hospital”—only then would the first glimpse of grass and “the stiff curl of the wildcarrot leaf’ be permitted—at the precise point at which every stick in the refuse emerged particular.
Terrifying
, as Robert Creeley was given to say.

From page one, the doctor lurches into an exchange with his imaginary critics. In lieu of titles or subtitles or headings, he spoofs the typographical stunts of the times, using both Arabic and Roman “chapters” to fence off units of poetry and prose, completely out of sequence.
Chapter XIII
appears upside down. The effect creates a minor distraction, albeit intentional, but it is the abrupt shifting, cutting, and swerving that prevent the reader from ever relaxing into the text. The suspense of the performance is carried all the way to “the edge of the petal.” Does love wait there? Will spring ever come? Who is Kiki—the nurse, the French artist model, the waif in the long-running play? Will the doctor please elucidate what he christens
imagination
? What does J. P. Morgan have to do with anything except what new money can buy, Old Masters? What does it mean to be “drunk with goats or pavement”? Country or city? Who else but Williams would grasp that the place to get the latest news about the weather and the last word on death is the barbershop? Who else cared what the barber thought? And when the whole atavistic American scene gets intolerable, would anyone be there to drive the car? 
Tranquilly Titicaca
indeed.

The prose is a working-through—hot with argument, loud with opinion. The overall form is a grand improvisation. Here a little rapture on the possible; here a riff on Shakespeare, on Poe, on Anatole France. The poetry was struck in one sitting, executed with what Hugh Kenner called Williams’s “great technical perception.” Here an ekphrastic poem on a painting by Juan Gris; here an homage to le jazz hot, le jazz cool; here a snapshot of what he saw through the windshield, or notations scribbled into a prescription pad. References ladled out of the “skyscraper soup” of industry, advertising, local speech—all the while spring itself was stiffly becoming manifest.

Yet, for the mash-up of affinities, free-floating associations, and spasms of anger, Williams loved simplicity and order. He avoided the sesquipedalian habits of Pound and Eliot. The stripped-down poems in
Spring & All
are as quick and unencumbered as any nude tripping down the stairs. The choice enjambment, “under the surge of the blue/ mottled clouds,” the lucent precision of the modest noun
glaze
, and the assertion that “The rose is obsolete” were stock-in-trade. He delivered the language scrubbed clean, made new.

This was a gutsy, self-conscious generation of writers and artists. They all knew each other. Pound and H.D. and the painter, Charles Demuth, to whom this book is dedicated, were friends from the college years. Williams was soon to befriend Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore and Mina Loy. The Stieglitz crowd. Duchamp and the collector Walter Arensberg, and on and on. They promoted and financed one another’s dreams, shared and competed for lovers, for recognition and influence. Williams’s profession planted him. In the city, the painters seeded his ideas. And he was there in the first rub, reading his “Overture to a Dance of Locomotives” at the 1913 Armory Show. (Ms. Loy was impressed, but not enough to lie with him.)

Williams was, according to Pound, the “hardiest specimen in these parts.” While zealously promoting the supremacy of the imagination, he dealt in real things, with individuals in real and current need. In his line of work, people were literally exposed. Then there was the endless variety of the species, which suited what Williams referred to as his nervous nature. Then everything along the roadside just popped out and demanded his immediate attention. He was a local. He was “seeking to articulate,” seeking “to name it.” He resisted revision. He loved art. He spoke “plain American.” He had a thirst for
now
. And he had his own beat, “a certain unquenchable exaltation” as he said of his renowned wheelbarrow. The excitement the writing exuded is as
contagious
today as when he made his rounds “quickened by the life about him.” The reader is induced to stay awake. Make contact. Look ahead. In 1923, poetry’s backward advance came to the crossroads. The pediatrician from Rutherford discharged the symbolic heap of myth and metaphor; adjusted his focal length to light up cast-off, common things; dug his heels into American dirt and passed directly into the moment. Ah, SPRING.

-
C. D. WRIGHT

To
Charles Demulh

I
F
anything of moment results — so much the better. And so much the more likely will it be that no one will want to see it.

There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here. Or rather, the whole world is between: Yesterday, tomorrow, Europe, Asia, Africa, — all things removed and impossible, the tower of the church at Seville, the Parthenon.

What do they mean when they say: „ I do not like your poems; you have no faith whatever. You seem neither to have suffered nor, in fact, to have felt anything very deeply. There is nothing appealing in what you say but on the contrary the poems are positively repellant. They are heartless, cruel, they make fun of humanity. What in God’s name do you mean? Are you a pagan? Have you no tolerance for human frailty? Rhyme you may perhaps take
away but rythm! why there is none in your work whatever. Is this what you call poetry? It is the very antithesis of poetry. It is antipoetry. It is the annihilation of life upon which you are bent. Poetry that used to go hand in hand with life, poetry that interpreted our deepest promptings, poetry that inspired, that led us forward to new discoveries, new depths of tolerance, new heights of exaltation. You moderns! it is the death of poetry that you are accomplishing. No. I cannot understand this work. You have not yet suffered a cruel blow from life. When you have suffered you will write differently? »

Perhaps this noble apostrophy means something terrible for me, I am not certain, but for the moment I interpret it to say: « You have robbed me. God, I am naked. What shall I do? » — By it they mean that when I have suffered (provided I have not done so as yet) I too shall run for cover; that I too shall seek refuge in fantasy. And mind you, I do not say that I will not. To decorate my age.

But today it is different.

The reader knows himself as he was twenty years ago and he has also in mind a vision of what he would be, some day. Oh, some day! But the thing he never knows and never dares to know is what he is at the exact moment that he is. And this moment is the
only thing in which I am at all interested. Ergo, who cares for anything I do? And what do I care?

I love my fellow creature. Jesus, how I love him: endways, sideways, frontways and all the other ways — but he doesn’t exist! Neither does she. I do, in a bastardly sort of way.

To whom then am I addressed? To the imagination.

In fact to return upon my theme for the time nearly all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has been always a search for „ the beautiful illusion”. Very well. I am not in search of „ the beautiful illusion”.

And if when I pompously announce that I am addressed — To the imagination — you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force — the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and to see.

In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so
long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace, the classic caress of author and reader. We are one. Whenever I say „I” I mean also „you". And so, together, as one, we shall begin.

o meager times, so fat in every thing imaginable! imagine the New World that rises to our windows from the sea on Mondays and on Saturdays — and on every other day of the week also. Imagine it in all its prismatic colorings, its counterpart in our souls — our souls that are great pianos whose strings, of honey and of steel, the divisions of the rainbow set twanging, loosing on the air great novels of adventure! Imagine the monster project of the moment: Tomorrow we the people of the United States are going to Europe armed to kill every man, woman and child in the area west of the Carpathian Mountains (also east) sparing none. Imagine the sensation it will cause. First we shall kill them and then they, us. But we are careful to spare the Spanish bulls, the birds, rabbits, small deer and of course — the Russians. For the Russians we shall build a bridge from edge to edge of the Atlantic — having first been at pains to slaughter all Canadians and Mexicans on this side. Then, oh then, the great feature will take place.

Never mind; the great event may not exist, so there is no need to speak further of it. Kill! kill! the English, the Irish, the French, the Germans, the Italians and the rest: friends or enemies, it makes no difference, kill them all. The bridge is to be blown up when all Russia is upon it. And why?

Because we love them — all. That is the secret: a new sort of murder. We make leberwurst of them. Bratwurst. But why, since we are ourselves doomed to suffer the same annihilation?

If I could say what is in my mind in Sanscrit or even Latin I would do so. But I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life’s inanity; the formality of its boredom; the orthodoxy of its stupidity. Kill! kill! let there be fresh meat…

The imagination, intoxicated by prohibitions, rises to drunken heights to destroy the world. Let it rage, let it kill. The imagination is supreme. To it all our works forever, from the remotest past to the farthest future, have been, are and will be dedicated. To it alone we show our wit by having raised in its honor as monument not the least pebble. To it now we come to dedicate our secret project: the annihilation of every human creature on the face of the earth. This is something never before attempted. None to remain; nothing but the lower vertebrates,
the mollusks, insects and plants. Then at last will the world be made anew. Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown thither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations. A marvellous serenity broken only by bird and wild beast calls reigns over the entire sphere. Order and peace abound.

This final and self inflicted holocaust has been all for love, for sweetest love, that together the human race, yellow, black, brown, red and white, agglutinated into one enormous soul may be gratified with the sight and retire to the heaven of heavens content to rest on its laurels. There, soul of souls, watching its own horrid unity, it boils and digests itself within the tissues of the great Being of Eternity that we shall then have become. With what magnificent explosions and odors will not the day be accomplished as we, the Great One among all creatures, shall go about contemplating our self-prohibited desires as we promenade them before the inward review of our own bowels — et cetera, et cetera, et cetera… and it is spring — both in Latin and Turkish, in English and Dutch, in Japanese and Italian; it is spring by Stinking River where a magnolia tree, without leaves, before what was once a farmhouse, now a ramshackle home for millworkers, raises its straggling branches of ivorywhite flowers.