I need to read this book again. I first read it and I fell in love with William Carlos Williams. This is work of literary criticism (which often philosophizes) threaded with some of the best poetry. Here you find Williams’s ethos open and bare. I found it exquisite like an oyster. I think I ate it with the same spoon too. The reprinting by New Directions Publishing as an object in itself is profound. I will read it again and I will have more to say. ( )

I really didn't know what to do with this collection and found myself a bit befuddled and disoriented by what I took to be a treatise as much as poetry collection. I could do with some follow up reviews, particularly around his ideas about imagination.

William Carlos Williams was an unusual artist. A Puerto Rican-American, he lived and worked as a pediatrician in New Jersey, but also wrote insightful and -for the times- salacious works. In fact, most of the original (1923) copies of SPRING AND ALL, printed by the same French publisher who brought out James Joyce's ULYSSES, were confiscated by US Customs for being immoral. I am glad that the work has survived, and was republished, in its entirety, by New Directions Publishing Co.

SPRING AND ALL is made up of interwoven poetry, prose, and fragments of prose which may be considered flash fiction, although that term is of more recent creation. Many of the works are identified by roman numerals, others begin with "Chapter", while still others have no title at all One title is purposely printed upside down. It is wholly modern, and directly challenged the conventions of poetry and storytelling at that time. The poems and prose investigate the impetus of inspiration, the natural world, the essence of creativity, and a biting critique of criticism leveled against modernist perspectives. He even spends quite a few pages discussing what he believes are the inherent similarities and differences between prose and poetry. That Williams was a peer of Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and other Modernist & avant-garde artists is not surprising in the least. In fact, SPRING AND ALL is dedicated to Charles Demuth, a Modernist, watercolor painter who met Williams in college.

SPRING AND ALL is a beautifully stirring collection of works by an early twentieth-century poet, writer, and physician. Unfortunately, because this was published around the same time as T.S. Eliot's THE WASTE LAND, it was overshadowed and mostly forgotten. It deserves a resurgence, because the themes are just as relevant now as they were nearly 100 years ago. ( )