Spring and All (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry)

Heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," the poems of Spring and All express the author's beliefs about the role and form of art in a modern context. William Carlos Williams offers an intensely stylized set of exercises in reduction that capture, in his words, "the immediacy of experiences." Sections of vivid, sensuous prose — described by the poet as "a mixture of philosophy and nonsense"—alternate with straightforward free verse that explores the creative uses of imagination and the power of language. "Spring and All," the title work of this 1923 collection, represents Williams's first major achievement as a poet, and was praised by The New York Times as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. This groundbreaking compilation also features some of the poet's best-known verse, including the modernist masterpieces: "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie."