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William Williams' "Spring and All"
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
A version of Spring and All without the sections of prose that were interspersed with the poems was first published in 1923; a year after The Waste Land first appeared. In titles alone, we can see the opposing ideals peeking through, The Waste Land, a poem embedded with imagery of “breeding / … out of the dead land,” a proposal of life moving forward in the wake of immense death that came with World War One, against the direct presentation of the title Spring and All, which seemingly appears as the solution, the key to rebirth (Ramazani 474).
To put The Waste Land in context, a primary c...
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...eme” (Spring and All 179). It is not enough to accept Williams’s words in Spring and All as a sound argument for the direction of poetry or as a proper list of what poetry shouldn’t be. One must examine the work as a reactionary piece to the issues of the time period it was written in while insuring that it carries along the ideals it intends to redefine, without question.
Works Cited
Ramazani, Jahan. Richard Ellmann, Robert O’Clair, ed. The Norton Anthology Of Modern And Contemporary Poetry. Vol 1 Modern Poetry. Third Edition. Norton. 2003.
Williams, William Carlos. Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New Directions. 1967. 146-150.
Williams, William Carlos. Spring and All. 1923.
Williams, William Carlos. The American Idiom: A Correspondence: William Carlos Williams & Harold Norse 1951-1961. Ed. John J. Wilson. Bright Tyger. San Francisco 1990.
Poetry’s role is evaluated according to what extent it mirrors, shapes and is reshaped by historical events. In the mid-19th century, some critics viewed poetry as “an expression of the poet’s personality, a manifestation of the poet’s intuition and of the social and historical context which shaped him” ( Preminger, Warnke, Hardison 511). Analysis of the historical, social, political and cultural events at a certain time helps the reader fully grasp a given work. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal
... Works Cited Everett, Nicholas. From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton.
... ... middle of paper ... ... Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Allison, Barrows, Blake, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry . 3rd Shorter ed. New York: Norton, 1983. 211.
Williams, Pontheolla T. Robert Hayden: A Critical Analysis of His Poetry. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Print.
For each seasonal section, there is a progression from beginning to end within the season. Each season is compiled in a progressive nature with poetry describing the beginning of a season coming before poetry for the end of the season. This is clear for spring, which starts with, “fallen snow [that] lingers on” and concludes with a poet lamenting that “spring should take its leave” (McCullough 14, 39). The imagery progresses from the end of winter, with snow still lingering around to when the signs of spring are disappearing. Although each poem alone does not show much in terms of the time of the year, when put into the context of other poems a timeline emerges from one season to the next. Each poem is linked to another poem when it comes to the entire anthology. By having each poem put into the context of another, a sense of organization emerges within each section. Every poem contributes to the meaning of a group of poems. The images used are meant to evoke a specific point in each season from the snow to the blossoms to the falling of the blossoms. Since each poem stands alone and has no true plot they lack the significance than if they were put into th...
...us 75.1 (Jan. 1991): 150-159. Rpt. in Poetry Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 58. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Meinke, Peter. “Untitled” Poetry: An Introduction. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s 2010. 89. Print
Thomas." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 101-10. Print.
Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology. 3rd ed. Ed. Helen Vendler. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
Mays, Kelly. "Poems for Further Study." Norton Introduction to Literature. Eleventh Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc., 2013. 771-772. Print.
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O’Clair. Modern Poems. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1989.
William Carlos Williams was fascinated by the ways in which living organisms and inert matter occupy space--how they move in it, or cannot move, are cramped or allowed to roam freely--and how the space inside organisms and matter is charted, perceived, and manipulated. Williams's preoccupation with actual space in the material world is paralleled by his formal experimentations with the placement of words on the page. "Without invention nothing is well spaced" (P 50), Williams writes at the beginning of "Sunday in the Park," raising the question, what does "well spaced" mean for Williams? How can the world and how can poetry be well spaced? The aim of this paper is to look at the relationship between Williams's use of what I will call spatial rhythms and the vision of poetry that emerges in "Sunday in the Park"--a section of Paterson particularly important for thinking about Williams's late poetic style because it contains the famous section beginning "The descent beckons / as the ascent beckoned," marking Williams's invention of the triadic stanza with "variable foot," a form he would begin to use frequently in the 1950's. My hope is to offer a new perspective on Williams's poetics by showing how it is rooted in a conception of space, both external and internal or biological, that is constantly moving in a rhythmic fashion.
Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry 1945-1960. Berkely, CA.: U. of California P., 1999.
Less is More The early 1900’s was a time of truly inspirational writers whose imprints are still left in our current language and the ways in which we write. Among one of those authors, was a man named William Carlos Williams. Born in 1883, Williams is among one of the four people acclaimed to have created modernism poetry along with a type of poetry called imagism. Imagism is a form of writing in American poetry that sought clarity of expression through the use of precise images.