Spring and All

William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" is a volume published in 1923 by Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co. It is a hybrid work made up of alternating sections of prose and free verse. It might best be understood as a manifesto of the imagination: the prose passages are a dramatic, energetic, and often cryptic series of statements about the ways in which language can be renewed such that it does not describe the world, but recreates it. These passages are interspersed with poems that demonstrate this recreation in both their form and content. The two most famous sections of "Spring and All" are poems I and XXII. The former, which opens, "By the road to the contagious hospital," is commonly known by the title "Spring and All," and the latter is generally known as "The Red Wheelbarrow."

"Spring and All" was printed in an edition of 300 by Maurice Darantière, the Dijon, France printer who had printed the first edition of James Joyce's "Ulysses" in 1922, and who also printed a range of other significant modernist works. It was never again published as a free-standing book, though the poems and some of the prose sections have been reprinted in various combinations through the years. In 1970, "Spring and All" in its entirety was republished by New Directions Publishers along with several other short works in the volume "Imaginations," and remains in print in that form today.