AND WITH IT SPRING

As the wings of birds beat the solid air without which none of them could fly so words freed from imagination confirm reality by their flight

What is Spring, beyond "the oldest figure of speech in the scriptures"? A strange little book by some American modernist printed in France by the publisher of Ulysses? An explosive manifesto – in prose? poetic?– that elevates the imagination to power 4-5 decades before May '68 "registered" the slogan?

For Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams was "the hardiest kind in these parts." He was concerned with real things, people with current needs, but at the same time he pushed language to the limit by extolling the superiority of imagination. And what Williams managed, right at the turning point of poetry, was to empty the symbolic heap of myth and metaphor and, stepping firmly on the ground, step directly into the moment. Ah yes, Spring!

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), one of the main representatives of modernism in American poetry, spoke Spanish as his first language (his mother was Puerto Rican and his father English raised in the Caribbean), studied medicine and became a pediatrician-pathologist : during the day he saw patients, at night he wrote. His completely free and improvisational style formed the basis and inspiration for the generation of beat poets of the '50s and '60s (Williams also wrote the introduction to Allen Ginsberg's Scream in 1956). Postmodernists reject his—always powerfully worded—assertion of the unmediated power and influence of poetry and art, but the value of his work endures as a reminder that anything is possible.

AND WITH IT SPRING

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