On "Spring and All"
James E. Breslin
This poem does not simply describe the physical qualities in a landscape; its center is an act of perception, "the stark dignity of / entrance," the slow penetration of a desolate landscape by an awakening observer. We follow the thrust of his imagination downward, through obstacles, to a new union with the physical environment. The progression in the poem is literally downward: the observer goes from "the blue / mottled clouds," across a distant view of "broad, muddy fields," to the quickening plant life right before him--and then penetrates even further downward, into the dark earth, as he imagines the roots taking hold again. The panoramic view, with its prospect of "muddy fields," dried weeds, "patches of standing water," offers nothing with which the imagination might joyously connect itself. At first an apparently blank and "lifeless" nature invites the observer to passivity and despair; but Williams pushes through vacancy to uncover dormant life.
Implicitly, "By the road" argues that Eliot's despair derives from his cosmopolitanism, his detachment from a locality. What the tenacious observer here finally perceives is no "waste" land but a "new world" and he makes his discovery by narrowing and focusing Whitman's panoramic vision upon the near and the ordinary. In the torpor of ordinary consciousness, what we find by the road to the contagious hospital is a desolate landscape. But the awakened consciousness, focused sharply and including everything in the scene, discovers novelty and life, the first "sluggish / dazed" stirrings of spring. Hence poet and landscape are gradually identified--as he too grips down and begins to awaken.
From William Carlos Williams: An American Artist. Copyright 1970 by James E. Breslin.
John Hollander
This is a poem of discovery, of the gradual emergence of the sense of spring from what looks otherwise like a disease of winter. The "contagious hospital" is both a colloquial usage, by doctors and patients, for the longer name, and a hospital that is itself contagious, that leaks its presence out onto the road. The cold wind will be revealed as a spring wind, but not before the poem's complex act of noticing has been completed. The meter here is a typographic strip about 30 ems wide with a general tendency to break syntax at tight points (lines 3 and 4 are normal, rather than exceptional); but notice the traditional use of discovery-enjambment in lines 2 and 3—"under the surge of the blue" because of its audible dactylic melody aims the syntax at a noun version of "blue," a metonymy for sky. But the next line discovers its mere adjectival use, appositively with "mottled," and the hopefulness of upward motion, the brief bit of visual and perhaps spiritual ascendancy is undercut by the bleakness of the wintry scene, and the totality of the non-greenness, even the exclusion of available blue. For the buds of spring do indeed look, at first, like tumorous nastinesses of the branch. But the poem moves toward the avowal of the discovery: "Now the grass, tomorrow / the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf." Its real conclusion, however, is revealed in the final moralization: "One by one objects are defined-- / It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf." The action of the poem is specifically discovered to be one of focusing; as one rotates a knob on the consciousness, the objects are defined, both in the world of the poem and by the poem, by poems in general. In its moralization, the poem is like "The Red Wheelbarrow," a manifesto about poetry. It is full of light, too, which it does not directly confront, the light that, as a younger poet has put it "wipes each thing to what it is,'' the light that takes us past what Stevens called "the evasions of metaphor." This is as visual a poem in every sense as one could find, a soundless picture of a soundless world, its form shaped rather than incanted, its surface like that of so much Modern poetry, now reflecting, now revealing its depths and, as the conscious wind of attention blows over it, now displaying the wavy texture of its surface. Put together from fragments of assertion, it has virtually no rhetorical sound. But its shape has become a familiar one—particularly for contemporary poetry of the eye—about its possibilities, betrayals and rewards, about rediscoveries of the visionary in the visual.
[. . . .]
Williams employs an enjambment which is directly in the line of Milton's type of revisionary disclosure:
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from thenortheast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
"Blue" in the second line might be nominal, and the surge of azure sky might be a too-easily gained sign of spring; the enjambment pulls it back into adjectival status, paired with, and half-modifying, "mottled." The fairly hard but merely systematic enjambments of "the" in the next two lines tend to soften, in retrospect, the modulation of "blue," as if to suggest, perhaps, that closure is no norm, that linearity has no marked integrity other than the rough typographical width of somewhere around thirty ems.
from Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form. Copyright 1975 by Oxford UP.
Peter Schmidt
As the poem begins "on the road to the contagious hospital," Williams has difficulty seeing any outline or order: "mottled," "patches," "waste," and "scattering" are some of the words he uses.His problems culminate in the third stanza, where inexact adjectives, often afflicted with the suffixes "-ish" or "-y," glut an entire line before a noun can be found. And even then the noun is imprecise: "All along the road the reddish / purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff . . . " Like the contagious diseases in the hospital Williams drives toward, imprecision is a contagion of the mind, potentially fatal.
As "one by one objects are defined by the advancing season, however, Williams' language is also reborn, and he can identify the wildcarrot, the only named species in the poem. His battle to see and to name has a "stark dignity" equal to spring's battle with winter, or a chicory's battle to create light from darkness. Like the plants, the poet's mind must "grip down," struggling to wrest a name from anonymity, The right name is a strong root; new poetry, and a new world, will grow from it as invincibly as the wildcarrot leaf uncurls,
"Spring and All" shows that Williams' pastoral lyrics use an archetypal plot borrowed from and Biblical myth: the occurence of an Eden or a Golden Age, man's loss and its eventual return. In the Bible, of course, such an advent signifies the end of history, whereas in Vergil inaugurates yet another historical cycle. Williams well represents romanticism's distinctive revision of this myth. The large historical cycles between Iron and Golden Ages, or Old Adam and New Messiah, are internalized and speeded up; the rebirth experienced in "Spring and All" is continually lost, found, and lost again.
from "Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral: Williams and the Precisionists." Contemporary Literature 21:3 (1980), 383-406.
Richard R. Frye
Williams' Spring and All begins with a straight-forward set of impressions in a poem that moves into a quickened vision, by way of imagination, of what is stirring into being beneath the surface. The first four stanzas of poem I, quoted above, consist of a succession of what Kenneth Burke, in a well-known instance, called "minute fixations"; but those serried minutiae that follow in the stanzas thereafter are much more than the resolute observations of a connoisseur of perception (48). In stanza five a subtle change in tone signals a shift in perspective:
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—
Hitherto a literal rendering of a series of visual fixations of objects in fields past which the poet is apparently driving, in this second phase the poem moves into a realm something like visionary personification. An emergent consciousness begins an intrinsic identification with "sluggish / dazed spring." The "objects" in the fields, as Stephen Tapscott notes, narrowly miss anthropomorphosis, assuming an energetic sentience flexible enough to service a complex network of analogous meanings (41).
This "second phase" constitutes a kind of clarified vision on the part of the mind within whose field of consciousness the scene appears that develops over the first four stanzas. Poem I, like the poems that follow it in Spring and All, represents (among other of Williams' assignments) a conscious attempt to externalize the form of the mind's perceptual intake of sense-experience. In the transition from perception to imagination, reality isn't changed but more fully and imaginatively entered. The description of a late-winter landscape metamorphoses, once the poet apprehends in advance the miraculous quickening of incipient life. In stanzas six and seven the process through which "dazed spring approaches" displays unmistakable dramatic elements; as a consequence, life in the poem bursts imaginatively into being:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
The point at which the planes-in-relation converge in poem I penetrates many subtle disguises; the "process of miraculous verisimilitude," the agent of which is the regenerative power of the imagination, compels the barren late-winter landscape into flourishing life—and resonates on several levels (SAA 95). Perhaps one is a swipe at T. S. Eliot, in whose "waste" Williams discovers merely dormant life:
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches— (my emphasis)
These lines appear to have been written within weeks after The Dial published Eliot's "The Waste Land." The connecting series of verb phrases, primarily participles, with which Eliot’s poem begins is perhaps subtly parodied in Williams' own series of prepositional phrases at the start of poem I. Here is Eliot's famous opening to The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
These sentences act to appeal ironically to the reverdie tradition in English poetry (especially as rendered in Chaucer's "The General Prologue" to The Canterbury Tales: "Whan that April with his showres soote / The droughte of March hath perced to the roote"). Eliot reverses the reverdie's popular form: a celebratory dance poem which serves as herald to spring. In The Waste Land, Tiresias instead laments the coming of spring; winter is recalled fondly, "feeding / A little life with dried tubers" but, mostly, "covering Earth in forgetful snow." Williams' opening lines, on the other hand, evoke an ostensibly sterile winter scene, the objective correlative, it would seem, of Tiresias' state of mind:
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from thenortheast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallenpatches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
Significantly, however, "the stark dignity" of Williams' barren field is "Lifeless in appearance" only; eventually, at the poem's close, "dazed spring approaches," its new green celebrated.
Another plane-convergence in the poem, the ambiguous pronoun reference in stanzas six through eight, also reaches several ways. While the "it" in stanza eight may refer exclusively to the burgeoning plant growth, it may also refer to the poet's perceptual linguistic rendering of that process. Perhaps it insinuates as well the early American settlers, about whom Williams was writing in 1923; most of In the American Grain (1925) was composed that year:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leafOne by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
These stanzas relate as well the transition of the vegetal world of vines to Williams' obstetrics; the poem's pronouns themselves intimate this: "All along the road the reddish . . . stuff . . . / They enter the new world naked." Why else this change in subject? And Audrey T. Rodgers, in Virgin and Whore (1987), offers yet another possible untrammeling: "The mythic theme of Kore—the rebirth and return to life to the soil out of pain and suffering"—which has "its counterpart in human birth" (36).
In Williams' idiosyncratic use of "planes in the geometric sense" the thrust is away from individual "signifiers" and toward the immutable structure of relations by which all the elements in a given poem are patterned. The tone of starkness and sterility early in poem I is a carefully crafted embodiment of a late-winter landscape. Williams apparently decided that if he could simulate in poetry the process of incipient growth which experience had taught him to be only latent beneath the barren ground, it would stand also as a linguistic graph of the mind's perceptual process. Ideally, the notion that the landscape and the mind share what amounts to a common process might provoke in the reader an awareness of systems of interconnectedness in which, conceivably, countless versions of a single process could be layered, one atop the other, in a unified, "objective" vision of the oneness of all initiation into life.
The use of geometric planes promotes multiple perspectives by careful arrangement of sentence elements. The primary syntactical unit by which setting-in-relation is enacted linguistically is the preposition:
By the road to the contagious hospital
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
From these exertions a veritable landscape emerges, presupposing, as it heaves itself into focus, a mind quite experienced in distinguishing among such apparently familiar objects and in acknowledging their relation to one another.
from "Seeing the Signs: Objectivist Premonitions in Williams' Spring and All." Sagetrieb 8.3
Albert Gelpi
The poem is a fine example of Williams' verbal Cubist Realism. The descriptiveness of the verses seems straightforward but is actually a carefully contrived verbal effect. The first line brings Whitman to Eliot's ailing world, the open road has led to the contagious hospital at the bleak end of winter. The first group of irregular, unrhymed lines seems to gloss The Waste Land, published the year before. "The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard," Eliot wrote, and Williams' redaction also uses the reiterated dental consonants--d's and t's--especially at the end of words and syllables, to suggest the balked stasis of the scene: "road," "clouds," "cold," "wind," "mottled," "northeast," "cold wind," "beyond," "waste," "broad," "muddy," "fields," "dried weeds," "standing," and so on. In addition, the alliteration, assonance, and internal near rhymes further link the details in a pervasive sterility: "road," cold"; "driven, ""wind"; "northeast," "waste"; "broad," "brown"; "fields, "weeds"; "dried weeds." Though there is no human person present, the implications of the scene for human life are intimated not just by the hospital but by the anthropomorphic associations of words like "standing and fallen," "upstanding," "forked," and "naked" (the last two perhaps echoes of Lear's unillusioned description of man), So, from the very beginning, the word play and sound play insist to the reader on the character of the medium as medium and thus on the verbal composition of the scene.
The dropping of the expected capital letter at the beginning of each line insists on the interplay between lines, as does the heavy enjambment. But paradoxically, the enjambment also emphasizes the fact that each line is an individual structural unit shaped to reinforce the dynamic process of sensory and intellective apprehension rather than the syntactic organization of the sentence. The Whitmanian free verse line, capitalized and end-stopped, stretches itself out to be as long and inclusive as possible, gathering in detail after detail, phrasal group after phrasal group, concluding only when the breath has run out, to begin again with the next breath to sum up the interrelatedness of all things; the lines accumulate paratactically as repeated efforts to submerge the particulars in the cosmic design. Williams' line is shorter, tenser, more nervous; the enjambment cuts and splices the grammatical elements of the sentence, using the highlighting at the beginning and end of the verse to focus on the discrete but related elements of the re-created scene. The line units work against, rather than with, the sentence; and the resulting line fragments remake the sentence--and the scene--into a unique pattern.
Thus the suspension between "blue" and "mottled" emphasizes both adjectival qualities, individually and in contrast, before substantiating them in "clouds." The next two lines end, startlingly, in the unspecified article "the," emphasizing even more the nouns at the beginning of the following lines. The effect of such Cubistic rearrangement can be easily grasped if the same words are lineated to observe grammatical groupings:
under the surge
of the blue mottled clouds
driven from the northeast--
a cold wind.
Beyond, the waste of broad muddy fields
Or, in longer lines:
under the surge of the blue mottled clouds
driven from the northeast -- a cold wind.
Beyond, the waste of broad muddy fields.
The vivid particularity of details is muted without the hang and turn and shift of Williams'jagged enjambment, maintained throughout the poem. . . .
The turn in the poem takes place between the third and fourth verse paragraphs. The first-word rhyming of "leafless" and "lifeless" signals the association between "leaf" and "life." "Lifeless" repeats "leafless," just as "sluggish" picks up on "reddish, purplish ... stuff." But in the second half of the poem the association between "leaf" and "life" turns from negation to renewal: "wildcarrot leaf," "outline of leaf." Even from the start, the poem has given clues that spring will arrive to break winter's deadlock. The word "surge" is the first premonition (recall "Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world" from the third section of "Song of Myself"), and the wind as the breath of spring, though "cold" in the first paragraph, becomes "familiar" as it blows life in, the process punctuated by temporal markers: "Now," "tomorrow," "One by one," "But now," "Still." The last "all" finds the transformative wind "all about them," and the waste land is a "new world."
From A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. Copyright 1987 by Cambridge University Press.
Philip Bufithis
Without involving ourselves in the intricacies Bloomian anxieties of influence, it is enough to say that poems answer poems and that in the June 1923 Issue of TheDial Williams answered The Waste Land with his now famous lyric "By the road to the contagious hospital," which in The Dial was simply titled "Poem."
"The contagious hospital" is a spring poem and so, really, is The Waste Land, the whole of which is a waiting for revivifying spring rain. It begins
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory with desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (473)
Then, after fourteen monological lines beginning with "Winter kept us warm," Eliot resumes his meditation on spring with
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say or guess, . . . (474)
This desolate imagery continues for nine lines, and then
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;Frishch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irish kind,
Wo weilest du?
In writing their spring lines both Eliot and Williams were working within a tradition as old as recorded European poetry. Ibycus, in the 6th century B.C., wrote the first spring poem we know of. It is about quince blossoms, new shoots, fresh wind, and the heart shaking. Beginning with Ibycus, Western poets have felt it incumbent upon them to write poems to spring. As a case in point, Chaucer's opening lines in his Prologue to The Canterbury Tales spring readily to the English-speaking mind. They contain the by then conventional vocabulary of spring poetry: April showres, roote, flowr, Zephyrus sweete [fresh].
Eliot, however, immediately overturns the tradition of spring poetry by calling April "the cruelest month," cruel because the sensibility described in his poem does not want to be awakened, does not want roots to stir and flowers to grow. Eliot, like Ibycus, has his beautiful fragrant flowers—lilacs and hyacinths, both amatory blooms –but he is using them ironically, unrhapsodically. And his lines are terse to desentimentalize the sadness.
"The contagious hospital" is determined to be a different kind of poem:
POEM
By William Carlos Williams
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallenpatches of standing water
the scattering of tall treesAll along the rood the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—Now the grass, to-morrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leafOne by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leafBut now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken (562)
This poem is Williams' rewriting of Eliot's Waste Land spring, yet he does not expunge Eliot's harshness. Like Eliot, he is working to found a new poetry of the antipoetic; he means not just to overturn what F. R. Leavis called "the intrinsically 'poetical' " (57). He means to explode it with the American local. His initial line, like Eliot's, is grim and arresting; he is taking his cue from Eliot here, but the time of the poem is March, not April, the standard spring month, and a cold north wind is blowing, not the Thracian wind of Ibycus or the Kentish wind of Chaucer or the Celtic wind of Eliot's Tristan und Isolde extract but an altogether unpoetic wind—a Rutherfordian one. The real rewriting of Eliot comes next:
All along the rood the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead brown leaves under them
leafless vines— (562)
These lines antipose the carefully measured syntax of The Waste Land with its opening main clause followed by three present participial phrases—a model form of what grammarians would call an advanced complex sentence. Williams' lines, on the other hand, are rough, unfinished, provisionary. They counter the adagio, studied quality of Eliot's lines throughout The Waste Land. While Eliot's lines are structured enough to be parsed, Williams' lines are asyntactic. They are notation. Our first impression is of something recorded quickly; the description comes in a rush because "The contagious hospital" is probably one of Williams' many car poems. Dr.Williams is on a medical call; he sees the roadside growth from his Ford, and he is trying to take it all in.
"Beauty," Williams said, "at its best seems truth incompletely realized" (Essays 75). The point is that car or no car, Williams' poetry characteristically shows the mind moving without preconception over the world. Though philosophers and psychologists tell us that the mind moving without preconception over the world is impossible, one thing seems sure: to Williams what the eye sees is of great importance, but it is less important than the eye seeing. He found his artistic contemporaries among painters rather than poets, which is to say that his poetry is a way of seeing as well as writing. The objects in "The contagious hospital" poem give the impression that Williams' sight merely happened on them. This time they are "the stuff of bushes and trees"; next time they will be whatever else happens to catch his eye, whatever else is strikingly optical; and they will spring forth, unlike Eliot's objects, seemingly unmediated by mind. Indeed, to Williams Eliot's poetry was unduly solipsistic, each scene always an accessory to the theatre of Eliot’s mind. The roadside growth, contrary to Eliot’s Imagery, demonstrates Williams' eyes asserting themselves before or outside of mental predisposition.
Williams' objects, however, only seem to be happened-on; actually there is an implicit process of extreme selectivity going on all the while. Williams focuses on objects that are local and endemically American, objects that most poetry, even Eliot's unpoetic poetry, overlooks. There are no blossoms in Williams' spring poem—not European ones, not garden ones, and especially not literary, mythological ones. In short no lilacs or hyacinths here. Instead, there is just growth, which by its very wildness and commonness connotes indestructible, rejuvenative power. One purpose of Williams' poem is to make us see that the common is remarkably distinctive. "I have sought," Williams said,
to re-name the things seen, now lost in a chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hid. . . . it has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorous of the life, nameless under the old misappellation. (American Grain v)
Noted: the growth by the side of the road is not weeds.
"The contagious hospital" is literally, then, a redemptive poem. Redeem: from the Latin redimere: re( d )—back + emere, to buy; hence, to buy back. Thematically Eliot's Waste Land is a redemptive poem too but in the traditionally religious sense, which is too tall a metaphysical order for a Williams' poem. The redeeming which Williams is dramatizing is instead born of the vital immediacy of the particular physical world around him. This is a Whitmanesque perspective, of course, and, further back, a Wordsworthian one. The difference is that Williams grounds that perspective in the vibrant language of idiomatic American English.
The dense consonantal mix of the roadside growth passage—its laterals, slides, dentals, sibilants, plosives, fricatives—audibly suggests the coarseness and thickness of what Williams is seeing. The growth is not red, not purple—but "reddish," "purplish." It is not twigs; it is "twiggy." To express what it is, this "stuff," Williams' language is necessarily uneuphonic, unmeasured, unEliotic. There is no place for such stuff in English poetry. Its reality can be seen only through the medium of American idiom. It is local—something, that is, that must be seen with other words and with a new voice. To be evoked, redeemed, in its felt immediacy, this stuff requires the rhythms of American speech, which are integral to Williams' poetic. "The rhythmic unit," he said,
usually came to me in a lyrical outburst. I wanted it to look that way on the page. I didn't go in for long lines because of my nervous nature. I couldn't. The rhythmic pace was the pace of speech, an excited pace because I was excited when I wrote. I was discovering, pressed by some violent mood. The lines were short, not studied. (I Wanted 15)
Deliberately unlike Eliot's Waste Land spring lines, which are all memory, a meditating back in time, "The contagious hospital" is remarkably devoid of memory. It is poetry as transcript, poetry as unreeling film which means to tell us that the essential reality of spring is its nowness. Image follows image until we visualize a particular American landscape impelled into the present moment. Eliot does the opposite. He distances spring: it was in the hyacinth garden; further back it was in Tristan und Isolde; further back still it was in the book of Ecclesiastes. The more distanced by memory, the more steeped in literary associations, the less specific the location of Eliot's images. Where, for example, is the hyacinth garden? And who ever heard of one? It seems there should be such a thing, but is there? And where is the "stony rubbish" or "the dead land" from which breed the lilacs? The images in Eliot's spring lines are sharp and forceful, yet there is no specific setting that gives them locality. In short, the context of his images lies in other literature; the context of Williams' images is a clear and present place. Eliot's purposes, of course, are not Williams', and it would obviously be unfair to Eliot to evaluate him in Williams' terms. The point is that to read Williams' poetry as a response to Eliot's is appreciably to increase our understanding of Williams.
And that response, we must further understand, is ambivalent. The high point of "The contagious hospital" poem is Williams' treatment of the roadside growth—it is the dramatic center of the poem because Williams is individuating a voice of his own, defining himself as his own modernist poet—but the opening and closing of his poem recall the cadences and imagery of The Waste Land (though it is important to distinguish here that Williams' lineation with its disorienting enjambments runs counter to Eliot's patterned, logical lineation). Reading The Waste Land, Williams must have found it too strong a felt presence to throw off, because, as antagonistic as his poem is to Eliot's, it also assimilates him. It opens in aural measures similar to Eliot's and with an Eliotic counter-sublime treatment of spring, and the poem's closing—
. . . rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken (562 )
—corresponds to Eliot's line,
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow (474)
William's closing is, of course, different in intention, but he too uses a personifying verb to describe roots. After the roadside growth passage—where the poem really "quickens," to use its later verb—"The contagious hospital" loses dramatic pressure partly because it resumes itself under the influence of Eliot and thereby becomes less the verbal equivalent of the "new world naked." Williams' counter-sublime imagination, a creative force for him inseparable from the rhythms and diction of American speech, compelled him to write the distinctive roadside growth passage and reveal "the quotidian burgeoning without a trace of yesterday," as R. P. Blackmur aptly described Williams' poetry (Form and Value 319). But the closing of the poem shows Williams caught in tradition: the sound of American speech diminishes; his syntax becomes more formal; his meaning grows discursive, his imagery unmistakably corresponds to the fifteen-hundred-year-old conventions of spring poetry.
Williams may well have sensed that his poem did not attain to the originality he would have liked when he said it "has been praised by the conventional boys for its form" (I Wanted 37). He was referring to the fact that the poem has often been anthologized, which is to say that the poem is neat; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it is about a recognizably poetic subject treated freshly but not so freshly as to be inscrutable; it is tame enough then—new but not too new, Williams must have thought—for the academics. The final irony rests with Eliot, who ends his Waste Land spring section with
(474)Öd' und leer das Meer.
A line that is original by virtue of its being plagiarized! Williams' acerbic appellation in Spring and All, "THE TRADITIONALISTS OF PLAGIARISM" (94, 97), coined mainly with Eliot in mind, is wrongheaded. Williams, it seems, did not recognize that old poetry reused could be so new.
from "William Carlos Williams Writing Against The Waste Land." SAGETRIEB 8.1-2 (Spring-Fall 1989).
Donald W. Markos
"Spring and All," a related but much more serious poem, expresses tones of awe, respect, and wonder before the process of life taking on form--of new form emerging from the semiformless mud and compost of a landscape on the verge of a significant change. There is also compassion for the new, delicate sprouts that emerge from the process. The inclusive indefiniteness of the pronoun in "They enter the new world naked" allows the process of birth in the vegetative realm to be associated with that of human birth as well Furthermore, the prose context of the poem in Spring and All, a book devoted to the renewal of the imagination, strongly suggests that Williams had in mind the birth of new forms of poetry as well as of plant life (although this idea is not explicit in the poem). The same creative force operating biologically in nature functions at a higher level in human consciousness to create art. Even at the level of nature the process seems to be teleological or in some sense purposeful. The pseudoactive verb in "It quickens" suggests that the process is in some way active and self-directing. Quickening is the result of organic, intrinsic motivation, not just mechanical causation. The new sprouts "grip down" and "begin to awaken"--to act with a kind of intelligence, to realize "subjective aim," the accomplishment of an inner design. "Spring and All" is not about an entirely alien, inhuman process; the process is mysterious, but it manifests something akin to human creative intelligence.
From Ideas in Things: The Poems of William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1994 by Associated University Presses.
John Lowney
The famous opening poem of Spring and All, later titled "Spring and All," epitomizes the physician's vision as poet's vision, while exemplifying the themes and techniques Williams explores throughout the book. The opening line of "Spring and All," "By the road to the contagious hospital" (CP 1, 183), places the poem in a medical context. The adjective contagious suggests that the hospital is itself contagious, that it does not contain disease, that sickness is an ever-present state in this bleak landscape. The entire book, as well as this poem itself, can be seen as Williams’s response to Eliot's depiction of the modern world as a wasteland. But it should also be seen as Williams's response to the wasteland world of poverty and disease he knew as a doctor. Williams's rendering of his wasteland of clouds, cold, mud, and dead plants gives it a stark beauty, however. The "purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees" (CP 1, 183) stands not as thematic background but as something worth examining in itself. The poem’s lineation compels us to notice the singularities and connections of these roadside images. There is no punctuation at the ends of lines, and the syntactic sense often precludes an expected end stop. For example, in the lines "under the surge of the blue / mottled clouds driven from the / northeast" (CP 1, 183), "blue" and "mottled" are separated by the line break, yet they are semantically fused. The eye jumps from what is normally an adjective, "blue," to the next line to find the noun, "clouds," but the line break suggests that "the blue" is itself an entity. The lineation produces the effect of a windy spring sky, the "blue mottled clouds" changing so rapidly that we must pay close attention to distinguish "blue" from "clouds." Similarly, the lines "purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees" (CP 1, 183) achieve this sense of dynamic process. These adjectives are separated by commas, and although they all modify "stuff," they evoke individual plants before jumping from "twiggy" to "stuff of bushes and small trees." The effect is one of constant shifts in perspective, from the clouds to the fields to patterns of landscape to details of the roadside growth—all portrayed without grammatical connectives. This process of vision and revision resembles the doctor's openness to his patients attempts to articulate their symptoms. Like the patient, the landscape is approached and examined "naked, just as it was, without a lie. telling itself . . . in its own terms" (A, 357).
Williams’s thematic retort to Eliot's more pessimistic vision occurs later in the poem; when in Williams's landscape spring arrives. life is renewed:
They enter the new world naked
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind
(CP 1, 183)
"They," following the approach of "sluggish dazed spring," evokes the shoots growing from the earth, but the syntax leaves the referent of "they" ambivalent, suggesting a more general concept of birth, physical rebirth that is spiritual in the sense of absolute faith in rebirth. "uncertain of all / save that they enter." The wind is "familiar," not shocking, to the newborn simply because there are no preconceptions in plant life, or in newborn life in general: the newborn adapt to environmental conditions that become immediately "familiar" because there is no sense of otherness. The late winter wasteland will give birth to spring whether we interpret it or not; the child will struggle to survive whether it is cared for or not.
The conclusion of "Spring and All" reiterates Williams's physician's vision of examining the world empirically, rather than symbolically: "One by one, objects are defined— / It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf" (CP 1, 183). These lines epitomize Williams’s rejection of "crude symbolism" in Spring and All: "The word must be put down for itself, not as a symbol of nature but a part, cognizant of the whole—aware—civilized" (CP 1,189). The "clarity, outline of leaf" represents not only the "leaf" of spring growth but the page as "outline of leaf" as well, the frame that directs our attention to the "clarity" of vision the words evoke. Hugh Kenner incisively summarizes Williams's poetic vision in terms that are also applicable to the doctor's vision: "This ability to move close to quite simple words, both hearing them as spoken—not quite the same thing as hearing their sounds—and seeing them interact on a typewritten page, gives Williams the sense of constant discovery. . . . 'No ideas but in things' meant that the energy moving from word to word would be like that of the eye moving from thing to thing, and not like that of the predicating faculty with its opinions." The closing imagery of "Spring and All" articulates the doctor's and the poet's "sense of constant discovery" in the figure of birth as rebirth. The newborn are "rooted," as they "grip down" through their roots and "begin to awaken." From the decay of winter arises the rebirth of spring growth; from the poverty of northern New Jersey arises the will to survive. Although death and decay are ever-present, the promise of new life and rebirth never disappears. There are no sentimental notions about spring here, only a belief in the indomitable will to be born, to survive.
from The American Avant-Garde Tradition: William Carlos Williams, Postmodern Poetry, and the Politics of Cultural Memory. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Associated University Presses.
David Kadlec
John Hollander and Steven Cushman have both written of the "systematic" use of enjambment as a distinguishing feature of William Carlos Williams's verse, with Cushman identifying enjambment itself as "the main principle of prosodic organization" of much of Williams's poetry from the 1920s onward. Cushman sees the gradual shortening of Williams's line in his early poetry as a key to his developing use of enjambment as a principle of prosodic organization.
In a poem where enjambments occur at the ends of ten- or twelve-syllable lines, those enjambments work locally, strongly affecting the beginnings and endings of lines, while exerting little immediate pressure on the middles. In a systematically enjambed short-line poem this changes. Suddenly, there is little left in a line that can be called its "middle." Instead, it has a head which inherits a syntactic remainder from the previous line and a tail where the next enjambment waits. The short-line poem is in a state of constant enjambment. In non-metrical verse short-line enjambments determine lineation directly, unlike their metrical, long-line counterparts. They have the immediate power to influence the grouping of successive words into successive lines. This grouping of successive elements (words) and events (lineations) becomes the basis of prosody in non-metrical verse.
Cushman's description of poems that achieve a "constant state of enjambment" can be applied to many of the poems in Spring and All, poems in which Williams began experimenting with extremely short lines. The "middles" of the opening lines of this surrealist jumble, for example, are as evasive as the images that they spill.
The sunlight in a
yellow plaque upon the
varnished flooris full of a song
inflated to
fifty pounds pressureat the faucet of
June that rings
the triangle of the air
(I, 109)
Relying on Hollander’s definition of enjambment as the nonalignment of syntax and lineation, Cushman approaches enjambment as an organizing principle by gauging the levels of resistance elicited by different types of nonalignment. Context certainly conditions a line’s resistance to enjambment, but as a rule resistance grows stronger as lines divide progressively smaller, more integral, syntactical units. A clause, for example, offers less resistance to being divided than does a phrase within a clause. Words themselves, divided into phonemes, offer the greatest resistance to enjambment. The line endings of poems written around the time of the poem eventually anthologized as "The Faucet of June" distinguish the poems of Spring and All from those with more conventional or "strong" line endings, poems like those gathered for publication in Al Que Quiere! in 1917 and in Sour Grapes in 1921. In the stanzas quoted above, many of the lines end with articles and prepositions rather than with nouns or verbs. Regular heavy enjambment of this sort ruptures the syntactic integrity of the poem, making an ongoing display of syntactic imperatives that would otherwise be concealed by an alignment of syntax with lineation. Movement is one of the overall effects of such a foregrounding of syntax. The lines of the poem begin to turn on their often deferred fulfillment of syntactic imperatives. Sunlight is released from the opening line of this poem, for example, only to be caught in some unspecified container—some indefinite "a." The opening lines and stanzas of "The Faucet of June" flow one into another, with the undressed imperatives of syntax determining their movement.
Though its lines are not as dramatically shortened as those of many of the poems that followed it in Spring and All. the opening stanza of "By the road to the contagious hospital" shares the prosodic makeup of what Cushman calls short-line nonmetrical verse.
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallenpatches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
The first line of the poem stands whole as a dependent clause made up of two prepositional phrases. Since little of the syntactic force of the opening sentence spills over from the first line to the second, the enjambment that occurs between the first two lines of this poem is relatively weak, or unresistant. In contrast to the first two lines of the poem, however, lines 2 and 3—"blue/mottled clouds"—are strongly enjambed across a fairly integral syntactic unit, a phrase within an encompassing clause. John Hollander has noted that for many readers of this poem, "blue" first appears as a nominal parallel to the "hospital" in line 1 (VR, 111). It is only the gradually unfolding necessity of syntax and the blatant phrasal enjambment of "from the / northeast" and "the/waste" that combine to slip "blue" into its less summery adjectival setting. If Williams's enjambed bending of the semantic status of "blue" owes something to poets like Milton, who practiced species of "sense variously drawn out" in his heavily enjambed blank verse poems of the seventeenth century, however, there was little prosodic precedent in 1923 for the harsh enjambment that followed the second line of this stanza, with lines 3 and 4 severing definite articles from their nouns.
Enjambment imbues "blue" with a nominal substance that lingers on after "blueness" is conditioned by an overcast sky; but it is another type of wrenching that takes place in the clouds that appear in line 3. Clouds materialize here only to evaporate into a phrase that draws them into relation to an unsupplied term. Here, the relation itself assumes the semantic force of the unspecified material that it fails to convey. There is no "middle" of the line-to contain the clouds because the subject of the line is neither "clouds" nor "northeast" but rather the flow of perception itself, "driven from the / northeast—a cold wind." Insofar as enjambment contributes to the "breathless budding of thought from thought" that Moore praised in Williams's poetry—or to what Hugh Kenner calls the "tractorlike" cadences of the poet's flatly "attributive" "Jersey speech rhythms"—its dramatic appearance on the road to the contagious hospital exhibits Williams's prosodic rendering of Dewey's writings on the infectious spirit of the local in America's immigrant culture.
The movement or the breathless budding of Williams's heavily enjambed poems is the fruit of a prosodic system that turns not on quantitative standards of measure but rather on the locally determined standard of "contact." Cushman's account of the relation in nonmetrical verse between words as "elements" and lines as "events" is a useful one for understanding the significance of Dewey's notion of the local orientation of immigrant culture to Williams's prosodic innovations of the early 1920s. Poetic lines can be described as events because lines of poetry score time. Apart from marking time, however, the non metrical line is an event determined by its relation or its "contact" with syntactic contingencies. Heavily resistant enjambment of the sort that characterizes many of the poems in Spring and All lays bare the otherwise hidden fibers of syntax by continually skewing its alignment with the poetic line. In poems characterized by short lines and by an absence of end-line punctuation, each line comes to make a graphic display of its coincidence or lack of coincidence with a particular stretch of an ongoing stream of syntactic modulation. In a short-line nonmetrical poem, the succession of elements that the line contains appears to be uniquely determined by the contingencies of the syntax that runs through it. Syntax is foregrounded as the sinuous genius of the very truncated line that breathes it to life.
By claiming that "in nonmetrical verse, short-line enjambments determine lineation directly," Cushman suggests that the standard that dictates each line is both local and dynamic. It is perpetually set and reset by the moment that the semantic chain provides it. The third and fourth lines of "By the road to the contagious hospital," then,
. . . of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste . . .
do not seem violently shortened by the imperatives of quantitative measure. Nor are they sheared by what Hollander calls the "rough" dictates of "typographical width" (VR, 111). They appear rather to be determined by the changing local contingencies of syntax as it slips variously in and out of alignment to feed the elements of one line meaningfully into the elements of the lilies that surround it. In "By the road to the contagious hospital," enjambment becomes the engine that fuels the approach to the hospital and the approach of spring. The "tail" of the clouds that emerge in line 3 is in the momentarily indeterminate "blue" of the line before it; and their "head," which is the movement that smears them across the sky, is in "the / northeast" that straddles into line 4, which in turn points to "the / waste" tipping into line 5. Rather than serving to illustrate either a correspondence or a randomly delineated noncorrespondence between quantitative measure and meaning, this poem's nonmetrical prosody—its system of alignments and nonalignments—propels a rush of perceptions that Williams described as "a force, an electricity, or a medium, a place" (I 150). The dynamic locality of the line is as much the native material of Spring and All as America's hospitals or wheelbarrows or its pure products gone crazy.
from Mosaic Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.
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