In Joshua Schuster’s critical analysis of William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All” [By the road to the contagious hospital], Shuster proposes that Carlos implements styles of his predecessors, such as the Futurists, Vorticists, and Dadaists. This is interpreted through the sense that Williams deconstructs the past in order to produce images of the future. Schuster notes how the poem starts in the present, depicting a barren image of a “contagious hospital” beneath “blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast” (11). The image of the hospital is not intended to offer hope such that of the optimistic image like one that connotes a newborn at a hospital. The grim nature of the hospital is paralleled by the images of the cold wind in which the hospital is situated.
Schuster continues to claim that the usage of the word ‘waste’ (the waste of broad, muddy fields with dried weeds…) (12) is a potential allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” an opinion in accordance with other critics. This waste may also reference other meanings such as a “nod to the Dadaists, who enraptured Williams.” He continues to explain that Williams’s ideas represent the ideas of a “general economy,” a term coined by Georges Bataille, meaning that “a functioning system requires not just productive, utilitarian operations, but also a way to let our pure expenditure, the release of waste and disposal of excess energy” (125). Schuster contextualizes this idea with Williams’s images of the poem against the backdrop of the season of spring brining about new life, new creation. With the coming of spring, the essential byproduct of waste is not altogether eradicated.
Schuster states that the landscape Williams presents us with is representative of integrating the decay of life with the return of life. This is evinced by images found towards the conclusion of the poem such as “small trees with dead brown leaves under them leafless vines” followed by “they enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.” Williams is potentially using “They” to refer to both plant and human life, says Schuster. He relates to this idea of the image of babies and how upon birth do not show distinguishing features, but are defined by “the commodity of their nakedness” (126).
Do you ever get the sense that criticism sometimes complicates certain poems by applying odd theoretical lenses? In this case, the critic uses ideas about the “general economy” and the “commodity of nakedness” to re-describe and in some sense over-complicate a poem whose purpose is to be more elemental. In your next critical post, it would be great to engage / respond to the critical as well as offering a summary.