Spring and All

2015 Reprint of 1923 Edition. Full Facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. A practicing physician for more than 40 years, William Carlos Williams became an experimenter, innovator and revolutionary figure in American poetry. In reaction against the rigid, rhyming format of 19th-century poets, Williams, his friend Ezra Pound and other early-20th-century poets formed the core of what became known as the "Imagist" movement. Their poetry focused on verbal pictures and moments of revealed truth, rather than a structure of consecutive events or thoughts and was expressed in free verse rather than rhyme. 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."