Chapter 5
Modernism (2)
T. S. Eliot
Stevenson
Williams
Assignments






Define the term modernism
List the thematic characteristics
modernism
Tell T. S. Eliot’s artistic features
What are the symbols in W. C. Williams’
Spring and All
List the themes of W. C. Williams’ Spring
and All and find lines from the poem to
support the themes each
Answer the first two question on page 183
from the Selected Readings
Contents
Modernism
 High-modernism
 Post-modernism
 T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
 William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
and Spring and all by William Carlos
Williams

Modernism
 As
a literary term
 Overview
 Characteristics of
Modernity/Modernism
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
*Thematic characteristics
Year that modernism starts

As a literary term
Modernism, as a literary style, emerged
after WWI, beginning in Europe and then
progressing into American literature by the
late 1920s. After the First World War many
people questioned the chaos and the
insanity of it all. The world’s “universal
truths” and trust in authority figures began
to crumble, and Modernism as a literary
movement was a response to the
destruction of these beliefs.
 Overview
*Modernist literature can be viewed
largely in terms of its formal,
stylistic and semantic movement
away from Romanticism, examining
subject matter that is traditionally
mundane--a prime example being The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S.
Eliot.
Romanticism stressed the subjectivity
of experience, Modernist writers were
more acutely conscious of the
objectivity of their surroundings. In
Modernism the object is: the language
doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an
epistemological aesthetic to an ontological
aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a
knowledge-based aesthetic to a beingbased aesthetic. This shift is central to
Modernism. Archibald MacLeish, for
instance, said, "A poem should not mean /
But be."
*Modernist literature often features a
marked pessimism, a clear rejection of
the optimism apparent in Victorian
literature. In fact, "a common motif in
Modernist fiction is that of an alienated
individual--a dysfunctional individual trying
in vain to make sense of a predominantly
urban and fragmented society." But the
questioning spirit of modernism could also
be seen, less elegaically, as part of a
necessary search for ways to make a new
sense of a broken world.
*Modernist literature often moves
beyond the limitations of the Realist
novel with a concern for larger factors
such as social or historical change. This
is prominent in "stream of
consciousness" writing. Examples can
be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens
and Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses,
Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean
Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury, and others.
*Modernism as a literary
movement is seen, in
large part, as a reaction to
the emergence of city life
as a central force in
society.
Characteristics
of
Modernity/Modernism
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
*Thematic characteristics
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
Free indirect speech
Stream of consciousness
Juxtaposition of characters
Wide use of classical allusions
Figure of speech
Inter-textuality
Personification
Hyperbole
Parataxis
Comparison
Quotation
Pun
Satire
Irony
Antiphrasis
Unconventional use of metaphor
Symbolic representation
Psychoanalysis
Discontinuous narrative
Meta-narrative
Multiple narrative points of view

Thematic characteristics
*Breakdown of social norms
*Realistic embodiment of social meanings
*Separation of meanings and senses from
the context
*Despairing individual behaviors in the
face of an unmanageable future
*Sense of spiritual loneliness
*Sense of alienation
*Sense of frustration
*Sense of disillusionment
*Rejection of the history
*Rejection of the outdated social
system
*Objection of the traditional thoughts
and the traditional moralities
*Objection of the religious thoughts
*Substitution of a mythical past
Post-modernism

As a liyerary school, it came about around
the end of WWII, though not actually
studied as a form until the mid 1980s. The
characteristics are the same as modernism
except postmodernism is more playful or
celebratory regarding the world's "insanity."
The idea being, okay, the world is chaotic,
there are no universal truths, lets see what
we can do with that. Examples of
postmodern works include:
Anais Nin's Under a Glass Bell (1944),
William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of
the Country (1968), and Toni Morrison's
Beloved (1987).
Both modernism and postmodernism may
have all or some of the above
characteristics; it isn’t required that all of the
traits are used in order for a piece to be
classified as modernist writing. The key
characteristics are usually fragmentation,
loss, distrust of authority, and the lack of
universal truths.
High modernism
*High modernism is a particular
instance of modernism, coined
towards the end of modernism.
"High modernism", presumably is
meant to specify the most
characteristic, developed,
consistent, or florid manifestation
of modernism. The term is used in
literature, criticism, music and the
visual arts.
In one sense, "high modernism" is
closely associated with anthropologist
and political scientist James C. Scott,
who uses the phrase in a pejorative
sense. Scott and his followers use the
phrase with an implied criticism of
modernism as austerely minimalist
and excessively rationalist or
bureaucratic combined with a sense of
hubris in its claims about the
inevitability of progress, or its claim to
embody progress.

In literature
The term "high modernism" as used in
literary criticism generally lacks the
pejorative connotations it has in other
contexts. High literary modernism, on the
contrary, is generally used to describe a
subgenre of literary modernism, and
generally encompasses works
published between the end of the First
World War and the beginning of the
Second.
Regardless of the specific year it was
produced, high modernism is
characterized primarily by a complete and
unambiguous embrace of what Andreas
Huyssen calls the "Great Divide." That is, it
believes that there is a clear distinction
between capital-A. Art and mass culture,
and it places itself firmly on the side of
Art and in opposition to popular or
mass culture. (Postmodernism,
according to Huyssen, may be defined
precisely by its rejection of this
distinction.)
Lists of canonical high modernists
often include:
James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra
Pound ,Virginia Woolf ,E. M. Forster,
Marcel Proust, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest
Hemingway
Gertrude Stein and Joseph Conrad (most
of whose work predates the generally
accepted time-frame of high literary
modernism).
 Whatever the literary schools are, they
all belong to modernism.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Outline
Life (p172)
 His major works (p173-174)
 His theories about literature (His “the
impersonal theory” of poetry or
“objective correlative” )
 The basic themes of his criticism
 Understanding of his The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock. And The Waste Land
(p183)
 V. His artistic features


His theories about literature
T. S. Eliot claimed himself a `classiest’ in
literature, royalist in politics and AngloCatholic in religion'.
*His “the impersonal theory” of poetry
or “objective correlative”
→Emphasizes the relation of a poem to
the poems by other authors and suggests
“the conception of poetry as a living whole
of all poetry that has ever been written.”
→Focuses on the relation of the poem and
its author.
→Impressions and experiences important
for the man may take no place in the
poetry.
→The relevance of a poem may be
ascribed, not to its reflection of the author's
personality, but to the fact that the author's
mind is a finely perfected medium in which
varied feelings are at liberty to enter into
new combinations.
→ “The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality." Eliot saw that in this
depersonalization the art approaches
science.
→Defined the objective correlative as a
way of expressing emotion by finding "a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula for that
particular emotion."
→The objective correlative makes a poem
intellectually and emotionally intelligible to
the reader by presenting concrete
circumstances that evoke an abstract
emotion. For an example of the technique
in action, consider the opening stanza of
his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
→"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape
from personality
 The
basic themes of his
criticism
*The relationship between tradition
and individual talent;
*The relation between the past,
the present and the future.
His artistic features
→Fresh visual imagery
→Flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm
→Full of quotations and allusions
→Images and symbols seem disconnected
→Lines in a number of foreign languages,
lack of narrative structure compounded by
startling juxtapositions,
→A sense of aloofness from the ordinary
sensory universe of day-to-day living.

William Carlos Williams
(1883-1963)
Outline
Life
 His literary ideas
 Williams’ poetic method
 Experiencing Spring and all by
William Carlos Williams

 His
literary ideas
Although his primary occupation was
as a doctor, Williams had a full literary
career. His work consists of short
stories, poems, plays, novels, critical
essays, an autobiography, translations
and correspondence, often associated
with modernism and Imagism.
Williams won the Pulitzer Prize in May
of 1963.
→As a young man Williams stayed true to
imagist style and principles and his early
poems, such as The Red Wheelbarrow,etc.
are similarly laconic and focused on things
in the world rather than abstractions.
However, as he grew older Williams
distanced himself from the imagist ideas
he had helped to establish with Ezra
Pound and Hilda Doolittle, whom he
ultimately rejected as being "too
European."
→ (This break came on the heels of a brief
collaboration with Pound on T.S. Eliot’s
epic poem The Waste Land, which he
derided as baroque and obscure. Eliot's
poem, despite its genius, seemed to him
years later a "great catastrophe to our
letters," a work of stylistic brilliance and the
learning, yet profoundly pessimistic its
description of modern culture as a "waste
land." Imagism, to Williams, had focused
so intently on images and things that it had
lost its human audience.)
→Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and
especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of
allusions to foreign languages and
Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste
Land.
→Williams most famously summarized his
poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but
in things"
→He advocated that poets leave aside
traditional poetic forms and unnecessary
literary allusions, and try to see the world
as it is.
→Williams drew his themes from what he called
"the local."
→He sought to renew language through the fresh,
raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and
social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it
from what he saw as the worn-out language of
British and European culture.
→Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an
American form of poetry whose subject matter
was centered on everyday circumstances of life
and the lives of common people.
→Finding beauty in the commonplace
was the goal of Williams' poetry
throughout his life, and while as a
young man he wrote about common
things, as he matured he came to
write uncommon thoughts with
common words. The ordinary, the
local, becomes reinvigorated through
the light of the poetic imagination,

Williams’ poetic method
It is probably best summarized by the
phrase “No ideas but in things,” which is
taken from his 1944 poem A Sort of Song.
Williams strongly advocated that poets
abandon traditional forms and
unnecessary literary allusions and attempt
to seethe world directly and reflect that in
their writing.
Spring and all
Outline
Introduction
 Brief Summary
 Line-by-line understanding
 Themes
 Literary device (technique)


Introduction
In a lot of ways, Spring and All is a classic
William Carlos Williams poem: short,
beautiful, and filled with simple images. It
focuses on making each moment as clear
and sharp as possible. He’s discovering
poetry in the world around him, in daily
experience. He’s inventing a style that
doesn’t need fancy words or references to
history in order to make its point or to
amaze reader with its beauty.
(But, before starting thinking that he’s all
about plants and fruit and simple pretty
words, we should know where this poem
comes from. It is part of a much longer
book called Spring and All, which is
CRAZY. It’s a mix of poems, prose, and all
kinds of ideas about the imagination,
writing, history, and so on. The chapters
are out of order, and the sentences stop
midway. In a lot of ways, it sounds like a
rant.)
Eventually, the book makes a kind of
weird sense, but it takes a lot of work
to get there. Luckily, Williams’s genius
also comes in bite-sized pieces, like
this poem. The bottom line? It’s easy
to read – and that’s how it’s supposed
to be – but there’s a lot behind it, and
a lot going on under the surface.

Brief Summary
Someone has stopped by the side of a
road that leads to a hospital, and he or she
is looking at the landscape. This person
(the speaker of the poem) begins by
describing the scene: the dead plants that
cover everything at the end of winter. Then,
the poem shifts, and the speaker describes
the coming of spring, imagining how new
life will emerge from this landscape as it
begins to wake up.
Line-by-line summary

Section I (lines 1-8)
*Line 1: By the road to the contagious hospital
(Get out the highlighters for this first line, because
it’s really important.)
The phrase "By the road" begins to set the scene.
It doesn’t tell us exactly where we are, but it
makes it easy to imagine the speaker traveling,
moving from Point A to Point B, and stopping to
look out over the landscape described in the poem.
*The last two words in the line make a much
bigger difference; this road leads to the
"contagious hospital." (That phrase
sounds like bad news, a place you already
don’t want to go.)
*The word "contagious" sets the mood for
the poem, so bear with us as we dig into
the background just a little.
*It seems important to know that Williams
earned his living as a doctor. We can’t
know if this poem is about an experience
he had, but he definitely would have been
familiar with hospitals.
*The difference between an open field and a
hospital ward might seem clear to us, but it
would have been very real for Williams. At
the time that the poem was written,
infectious disease was still a big deal in
America, and one needed separate spaces
to confine anyone with a disease like
smallpox.
Just keep in mind that the word
"contagious" makes the image of the
hospital even more intense. It’s a place
you really don’t want to end up in – maybe
even as a doctor.
*Lines 2-4:
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
Immediately, the road and the hospital disappear,
and the sentence continues with a description of
the clouds.
→(Thinking of your standard clouds, you might
imagine a sort of cheerful, fluffy thing in the sky.
Here’s is not these clouds. There’s nothing scary
about them exactly, but nothing comforting either.)
*These clouds don’t "drift" or "float" – they "surge."
These clouds rush into the poem, filled with
power, hurried along by the wind.
*Where some clouds might be a comforting, even
white, these are "blue-mottled." the sentence
ends with "a cold wind."
This is definitely a poem that’s designed to make
reader practically taste every word, to feel how
cold that wind is, to imagine that hospital looming
in the distance.
*Bottom line, this starts out on a pretty bleak note.
Not miserable, necessarily, just a cold, blustery
and not-too-welcoming sky.
*Lines 5-8:
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
→It tells that things don’t get a lot happier here.
→For the first time, plants, brown and dry, are seen
as well as mud, dirty water, etc.
→However, what is brought before the eyes is a
"waste," as the speaker puts it: an empty space,
without any life that the eye can see.
→Check out the sneaky way that he ties together
the pieces of this poem. In the sixth line, weeds
are "standing and fallen." Then, in the seventh,
"patches of standing water" is seen.
→As a common sense, weeds and water don’t
"stand" in the same way, but the repetition of that
word fits those two lines together like puzzle
pieces. So, even if the landscape isn’t exactly
pretty, it does "rhyme" in a way.
→Also, the next line includes the word "tall" which
sounds a lot like "fallen."
Section II (lines 9-15)
*Lines 9-13:
All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vinesMore fun with dead plants.
→Around the edges, Williams does start to breathe
some life into the scene. Some new colors do
appear – reddish and purplish – but, for the most
part, we’re still up close and personal with dry,
brown leaves and trees.

*Lines 14-15:
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches→Then, just as one might be getting tired of this
stuff… WHAM. The poem shifts, and one catches
the first glimpse of spring.
→Spring doesn’t happen right away; in fact, it sort
of sneaks into the line, appearing in the distance.
→At first, one can’t even tell it’s there. The
landscape still seems "lifeless," just like the vines
in line 13 were "leafless."
→But, something has changed, and Williams wants
the reader to look more closely. Spring is there,
waiting for us to see it.
*Even though there aren’t any real
characters in this poem, spring is
introduced as if it has a personality. Like
some creature waking up, it is "sluggish"
and "dazed."
*This is the first sign of life, and it’s also the
first thing Williams treats like a living being.
*He’s not going to beat the reader over the
head with it, but this is a big moment. The
entire book is called "Spring and All," and
now… here’s spring.
Section III (lines 16-23)
*Lines 16-19:
They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind→Now that we’ve had a line or two to get used to
spring, here come more new things. The next
section tells us that other things are approaching,
too.
→"They enter," Williams tells us, but who are they?
He only tells us a few things: they’re naked and
cold, and, well, they’re entering.

*It’s a little bit of a mystery, and it forces us to
guess, to look for clues, and to read more
closely. We know that they are different
from "sluggish" spring, but we have to wait
to learn more.
*Williams could just say who they are from
the beginning, but he teases us a little. He
wants to make his poems clear, but maybe
not always too easy.
*Do you see how the image of these plants
coming into the world might make us think
of human babies being born? This is called
personification, and he uses it in a few
spots in the poem. It’s one of a lot of ways
that he twists together the human and the
natural worlds, and suggests that they’re
really just aspects of the same thing.
See how he brings back that cold wind from
the fourth line?
*Lines 20-23:
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are definedIt quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
→Now, things start to pick up speed, and
Williams solves our mini-mystery.
→It looks like "they" are the new plants that
poke up through the dead leaves, although
he never quite comes out and says so.
*Things get clearer, as spring takes hold.
*Do you feel how the mood of the poem changes?
After the groggy feeling of winter, things are
beginning to thaw, to pop out and change.
*For example, look at the word "quickens." Here, it
means "comes back to life," but it also hints at
the way the world speeds up in spring. Even the
sound of the word is fast and lively, the opposite
of the "sluggish" feeling the poem talked about a
minute ago.
*Things are about to change, and, when they do, it
will move fast.
Section IV (lines 24-27)
*Lines 24-27
But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken
But… we’re not quite in spring yet. The poem gets
ahead of itself.
*This poem isn’t about things actually happening –
it’s about things beginning to happen. The word
"entrance" is really a key here. We’re just setting
the stage for spring, not actually watching the
play that’s about to start.
*If Williams speeded things up in the last few lines,
now he slows them down again.

→We’re back at the beginning point, in a way,
but something has changed. Down at the roots,
things are waking up. We’re looking for things to
happen on the surface, but the real changes are
going on underground.
*As you probably noticed, nothing much actually
happens in this poem. But, things are about to
happen. Basically, the "spring" that Williams talks
about isn’t just happening in the poem. "By the
road to the contagious hospital" was written at a
big moment in history, a turning point for art,
poetry, etc. WWI was just over, the world had
changed, and people were looking for a way to
talk, think, and write about the modern world.
→Williams knew a lot about this – he was
friends with tons of these "Modernist"
artists, and he was finding his own way to
deal with these questions. Lucky for us, he
wrote simple, beautiful poems that are
actually fun to read. Contrast to some of
his friends, Ezra Pound, for example, he
made it a lot harder on themselves and on
their readers.
Themes
Man and the Natural World
 Mortality
 Transformation

*Man and the Natural World
This is the big theme. Now, this could have been
a poem just about nature, and for the most part,
it is. But, someone is watching this nature, and
someone is talking about it. Williams drives this
point home hard by starting us out with the road
and the hospital. Those two places are major
symbols of the human world. They cut through
the landscape and shut it out. In order for this
poem to happen, the speaker and the reader
have to step out of these human spaces and pay
real attention to the natural environment.
→Quotes & Thoughts on Man and the
Natural World
By the road to the contagious hospital (line 1)
Thought: This is about nature. So, why is
this important theme and not just a quick
reference? The fact is that it is a big clue.
Williams uses this line to set up different
two worlds. On the one hand, we have
nature, with its fields, trees, grass, etc. On
the other hand, we have the world of
hospitals and roads, and, therefore, also
the world of jobs, cars, responsibilities, etc.
*Mortality
Death opens this poem in a big way. It’s hard to
think about a contagious hospital without thinking
about the possibility of death. If that wasn’t
enough, the landscape turns out to be dead, too.
Check out the "dried weeds, standing and fallen,"
and the "dead, brown leaves." Ultimately, the
whole world we see in this poem is "lifeless in
appearance." That last word is a key, though.
While a disease might make you really dead, the
land only "appears dead." The payoff in the poem,
the heartwarming conclusion, is that this isn’t the
scary kind of death, but the kind that leads to
rebirth.
→Quotes & Thoughts on Mortality (Lines 1, 4-6)
small trees with dead brown leaves under them
leafless vines (lines 11-13)
Thought: Dead stuff. Since Williams repeats
himself a bit here, we can guess he’s sending us
a message. He really wants us to soak up this
idea of a dead landscape. He wants us to see
and feel how lifeless winter can be. He even uses
a word, "leafless," that sounds really similar to
"lifeless." If we really feel all of the weight of
death at the beginning, then the turn towards life
hits us even harder.
*Transformation
Transformations are a major way Williams
approaches nature in this poem. What he
describes is "just" the changing of the
seasons, but he makes it into a really big
event. The world is changing, transforming
itself from brown to green, from dead to
living, from cold and windy to calm and
warm. As Williams puts it: "the profound
change has come upon them." It’s the big
shift in the poem, so it’s definitely worth
underlining here.(answer to question 2
on p193)
→Quotes & Thoughts on Transformation (lines
20-21, 25-26)
sluggish dazed spring approaches (lines 14-15)
Thought: This is the beginning of the change. Up
to this point, everything has been lifeless and still.
Nothing has changed in the landscape. Now,
something new is coming. The transformation
doesn’t happen all at once. Williams points out
that spring is still sluggish (talk about a word that
sounds like what it means!), but things are waking
up.
Literary device (technique)
 Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
 Form and Meter
 Speaker Point of View
 About the title
Literary device (technique)
 Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay
*Spring
As you might have guessed from the title, Spring is
a pretty important part of this poem. Eventually, it
emerges as a kind of weird main character,
taking on almost human characteristics as it
changes the world of the poem.
(Lines 14-15: Our first glimpse of spring. When it
shows up, it is described as being "sluggish and
dazed." These words usually apply to humans,
and, when they are used to describe an object or
an idea like spring, that’s called personification.
Line 25: Here’s a point that Williams fills in a
little bit in other places in the book "Spring
and All." The "profound change" of spring’s
arrival is a metaphor for the changes that
are sweeping over the whole world in the
early 20th Century. World War I is over;
people are producing new and exciting art
and philosophy, and starting to see some
new prosperity. In a general sense, spring
has always been a symbol of new
beginnings, but Williams definitely has
some specific things to say about his
moment in history.)
*Plants
The poem is chock full of plants, both the dead old
ones that Winter has left behind, and the new
ones that are emerging with spring.
(Lines 9-13: This is a pretty long description of
dead plants, especially for a poem this short.
This tips us off to the importance of these plants
as an image of cold and lifeless winter. More
generally, they are symbols of the death that
must come before rebirth and new possibility.
Line 16-18: These new plants are compared to
human babies, another use of personification).
*The Hospital
The man-made objects that open the poem have a
big influence on the way we look at the nature
scenes that follow. The hospital becomes a kind
of lens that changes the way we see the world in
the poem.
(Line 1: The image of the contagious hospital puts
us (just for a moment) in a completely human
world. Everything that follows is natural, but here,
for just a second, we’re stuck in a place of
disease, with its white sheets and the smell of
disinfectant. ) Williams is too sly to tell us exactly
what the hospital means, but, sitting where
it does, we can be sure that this isn’t just a
random location.
Then again, if we’re going to make a deal
out of the hospital, it wouldn’t be fair to
leave out the road. It’s not as exciting as a
"contagious hospital," but it’s a pretty
important symbol, especially in America. In
so many books and movies, it stands for
freedom and possibility. On the other hand,
roads can also make us think of danger,
loneliness, and the violation of nature.)
*Form and Meter: Free Verse
This poem doesn’t have a regular meter,
and the lines don’t rhyme. This is "free
verse." Williams wasn’t real interested in
the fancy traditions of poetry, and he was
working hard to avoid getting stuck in old
ways of doing things. He needed a poetic
style that was modern, unpretentious, and
direct, and that’s pretty much what he got
in his poem. The choice of words, the
arrangement of the lines, and the use of
images in this poem are all very precise,
and designed to create specific effects.
*Speaker Point of View
Our speaker is someone who stops by the side of a
road, looking at the landscape in late winter and
telling us about it. But we don’t know much else.
Now, we always make a point of saying that the
speaker is a fictional character, a creation of the
author, rather than the author himself. Even if the
poem is autobiographical, the speaker is still a
made-up version of the author.
In this case though, we know that Williams was a
doctor, and so it seems convenient that this
character would be headed to a hospital.
*About the title
This poem was the first in the book "Spring
and All," and the only title Williams gave it
was "I" People who needed a way to refer
to this poem just called it by its first line:
"By the road to the contagious hospital. As
the poem became more popular, it got
pulled out of the book it was published in,
and started to be printed as a stand-alone
poem. In some cases, the book’s title was
slapped onto the poem.
If the poem is called "Spring and All," then
we may not be so surprised when spring
finally appears in the middle. If the poem
has no title except the first line, maybe the
appearance of spring will feel like more of a
change.
In the summary for line 1 (above), we talked
about how the contagious hospital looms
over the poem, so maybe we have a sense
of how it works as a title.
The "Spring" part makes a lot of sense, but
how about the "and All?" If we look at it
from one side, these two words provide the
little bit of mystery and extra complication
that Williams loves. His poems focus on
basic ideas and simple images, but they
approach them in a way that forces you to
think a little more about their meaning.
Adding the "and All" gives your imagination
some space to play, to think of new and
different possibilities.
---- The end