William Carlos Williams: Success and New Beginnings Found in the Capacity of the Imagination

“Well done, everybody. Spring is here, and it’s awesome.”

In The Poetry Foundation’s Biography on William Carlos Williams, the author explains that Williams existed not only in relation to, but also in defiance against his literary contemporaries. Though he deeply admired and drew inspiration from poets like T.S. Elliot, William’s poetry seems to take on a life and sense of excitement which one may argue parallels the attitudes of American culture at the time. Many poets that wrote at the same time as Williams, like the formerly mentioned Eliot, chose to include grim images of the realities of life, leaving the reader with a solid sense of the certain disruptions created by the aftermath of World War I and other political and cultural exploits. However, Williams differed from his contemporary in this stance, as it seems as though Spring and All is in stark contrast to The Wasteland, almost a paradoxical rebuttal to the harsh pictures of Eliot’s spring.

Rather than using the formidable realities of the time as a lynchpin for his poems, Williams seems to breath a sense of life and excitement in his poetry that mimics the patriotic American spirit of the early roaring twenties, one where a country was consistently attempting to maintain and construct an identity grounded in strength, innovation, and freedom. Williams’ poetry behaves accordingly, as it has a tone of pure energy and non-steadfast structure, one which entices the reader by constantly changing the subject and reverting theories back to their initial statements, like the ideal in Spring and All that “imagination is supreme” (5). Rather than living within the constrictions of poetry form or subject, Williams chose to be a free and autonomous entity, just as America had decided to rid itself of any English ties and construct American fundamentals on the ideals of liberty and new beginnings.

On the subject of America’s new beginnings, we may see a correlation with Spring and All, as Williams insists throughout the narrative on a time of renewal, growth, and an approaching sense of splendor found in spring: “Yes, hope as awakened once more in men’s hearts. It is NEW! Let us go forward” (14). It can be understood that during a time of beginnings, the imagination is a coveted force, and Williams championed it as such throughout his book insisting that it is indeed the root to all things creative as well as intellectual. “Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible,” wrote Williams, “to keep beside growing understanding” (28). He goes on to reiterate that while imagination is the key to intelligence, it may thus conversely be deemed as the condition upon which we may identify non-intelligence, as the “complete lack of imagination would be the same at the cost of intelligence, complete” (28). We may understand that William’s emphasizes this point not only because he believes imagination is the ground by which brilliance is built, but also because perhaps it is by the imagination of the founding fathers that the great country by which he has come to identify this (despite his foreign roots) was able to thrive and embark on a new beginning of its own.