William Carlos Williams’s Liberation within Spring and All

In George Hart’s essay, “‘The Power of Confusion’: Spring and All’s Prose, Poetry, and Poetics,” Hart is arguing the fact that the confusion in Williams’s Spring and All is an accurate portrayal of what modernist poetry is.  Hart argues that “[he] wants to consider how Spring and All specifically uses its confusions about romanticism to discover its modernist poetics.” (20)  Hart describes how Williams confuses prose and poetry by mixing them together without specific distinction between the two.  Hart clarifies how Williams draws from both Poe’s and Emerson’s “romantic theories of composition,” (19) yet rejects both of them in some ways.

Williams was trying to create his own theory of composition, being romantic as well as clearly modernist.  In Spring and All, Hart declares that Williams is “trying to figure out the social role of the poet via his relation to language.” (20)  And while Spring and All’s mix of prose and poetry may be confusing, Williams also makes the actually work itself somewhat confusing in subject matter, considering ideas on birth and newness.  He even states “a terrific confusion has taken place,” in prose.

By splitting up Spring and All into sections labeled as chapters, the reader does not know whether to expect prose, poetry, or a mix of the two.  Williams tries to separate  thoughts from one another to obtain a sense of liberation in his poetry.  The essay argues that in Williams poem XVIII, he is “bring[ing] the text to its crisis of isolation.” (22)  Therefore he wanted to separate prose and poetry while isolating distinct thoughts.  Within Williams’s Spring and All, he shows how he was trying to obtain a freedom in his poetry and prose, because “the purpose of poetry is liberation.” (23)  Williams found it hard to obtain this liberation because he could not will his imagination to free himself, although he knew that it had the ability to do so.  Hart is stating that Spring and All is a journey through confusion, isolation, separation, and liberation – showing Williams’s struggle with finding liberation in his poetry in a modernist sense.

William Carlos Williams