Spring and All (1923) is a book of poems by William Carlos Williams. Predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his works, often comprised of a seamless blend of both forms of writing. In Spring and All, the closest thing to a manifesto he wrote, Williams addresses the nature of his modern poetics which not only pursues a particularly American idiom, but attempts to capture the relationship between language and the world it describes. Part essay, part poem, Spring and All is a landmark of American literature from a poet whose daring search for the outer limits of life both redefined and expanded the meaning of language itself. “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world. If there is an ocean it is here.” In Spring and All, Williams identifies the incomprehensible nature of consciousness as the single most important subject of poetry. Accused of being “heartless” and “cruel,” of producing “positively repellant” works of art in order to “make fun of humanity,” Williams doesn’t so much defend himself as dig in his heels. His poetry is addressed “[t]o the imagination” itself; it seeks to break down the “the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment.” When he states that “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow,” he refers to the need to understand the nature of language, which keeps us in touch with the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.

Imaginations makes accessible to the broad reading public live early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for Kora in Hell, have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms. Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.” The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

A dozen poems on love by a New Jersey obstetrician (1883-1963) who often wrote them on office prescription pads. In the title poem, first published when he was 72, he wrote: "What power has love but forgiveness? / In other words / by its intervention / what has been done / can be undone."

The alphabet of the trees is fading in the song of the leaves' Selected poems by the great American imagist poet.

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."