Ebook Spring and All

First published in 1923, Spring and All is the groundbreaking volume of poetry by the modernist and imagist American poet William Carlos Williams. A practicing physician for more than 40 years, Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the "Imagist" movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme. Two of Williams’s most famous poems can be found in this volume, numbered in the book as I and XXII, these poems are known more commonly as “Spring and All” and “The Red Wheelbarrow” respectively. While “Spring and All” received little attention during Williams’s lifetime, it was reprinted after his death and continues to be viewed as an important and significant work of American literature, being named by the Library of Congress in 2012 as one of the 88 “Books that Shaped America”.